Have you ever copied a hunk of text that was overly-formatted? You know, italic, underlined, and written in some really strange looking font that's next to impossible to read.

Like this:

When you paste it into your word processor, chances are that it retains all those properties. Now, you could go and try to re-format the text back into something normal, but that can sometimes prove problematic.

A better way is to copy the text into Notepad and let it remove the formatting automatically. After you paste the text in, all you're left with is plain text than can be pasted into any word processing application.

Here is that text pased into Winodows Notepad: