Have you ever found yourself manually formatting text from one format to another? Perhaps copying content from a website and painstakingly converting it to Markdown or JSON? If so, you're about to discover a game-changing solution that will simplify your workflow down to a few strokes on the keyboard.

PowerToys: A Utility Belt for Savvy Windows Users

Meet PowerToys, an open-source suite extending native Windows capabilities, developed in collaboration with Microsoft (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: PowerToys main window.

PowerToys combines a myriad of time-saving and, dare we say it, truly life-hacking tools. These include such gems as Workspaces for application management, FancyZones for custom window tiling, PowerRun for advanced search, File Explorer add-ons for enhanced previews, or the Color Picker for grabbing hex values from anywhere on screen. The list goes on and on.

But today, we're focusing on one particular tool that can solve your text conversion headaches: Advanced Paste.

Janea Systems and PowerToys: Extending Windows for Power Users

Janea Systems has significantly contributed to PowerToys development, making it one of the top open source repositories on GitHub. We delivered 30 different modules, closed thousands of issues, integrated generative AI, and fostered genuine community engagement, bringing PowerToys to over 100 thousand stars on GitHub.

Our engineers didn’t just co-create PowerToys. They also endorse it as the ultimate productivity tool for Windows power users. Take Janea Systems’ own Jamie Bernardo, Lead Software Engineer and a driving force behind PowerToys development, who extols PowerToys benefits in this exclusive extended interview.

If that’s enough in terms of credentials, let us show you a glimpse of PowerToys potential: Advanced Paste for clipboard transformations.

Advanced Paste: Clipboard on Steroids

Think of Advanced Paste as your clipboard's smart assistant. Instead of just pasting whatever you copied in plain text, this utility gives you the power to transform that text into different formats with simple keyboard shortcuts or through an intuitive interface.

The beauty of Advanced Paste lies in its versatility. It can convert your clipboard into specific formats like plain text, JSON, or Markdown without requiring any external tools or manual formatting.

That’s not all. Advanced Paste also leverages API calls to generative AI for more sophisticated manipulations using natural language prompts, enabling functionalities like text stylization, summarization, translation, and code generation.

For this guide, however, we're focusing on the features that work right out of the box without requiring any AI setup. Don't worry! We’re leaving the AI-powered features for our next article.

If You Haven't Installed PowerToys Yet

Before we can solve your text conversion challenges, let's make sure you have the right tools in place. If PowerToys isn't already on your machine, you'll want to download it from the Microsoft Store or from the official PowerToys GitHub releases page.

Once you've got it installed, you'll notice PowerToys appears in your system tray.

Once PowerToys Is Up and Running

Now that you're ready to go, let's get Advanced Paste configured so you can start transforming text with ease.

Enable Advanced Paste in Settings

Your first stop is the PowerToys Settings panel. Right-click that PowerToys system tray icon and select "Settings" to get started (Figure 3).

Fig. 3: Right-click PowerToys tray icon and select “Settings”. 

Once you're in the settings, expand the “System Tools” dropdown in the left sidebar and choose "Advanced Paste".

In the next window, toggle the "Enable Advanced Paste" switch to the "On" position, and you're ready to start transforming your clipboard content (Figure 4).

Fig. 4: Select “Advanced Paste” in PowerToys System Tools and activate the utility.

Configure Keyboard Shortcuts

This is where you'll really start saving time. Setting up keyboard shortcuts means you can transform text without breaking your workflow or reaching for the mouse.

Scroll down to the “Actions” section to see keyboard configuration options (Figure 5).

Fig. 5: Configuring keyboard shortcuts for Advanced Paste.

The Actions section allows you to configure the following shortcuts:

• Open Advanced Paste window: The default is Windows + Shift + V, but feel free to customize this.
• Paste as plain text directly: Default is Windows + Shift + Alt + V. It’s perfect for when you need to strip all formatting instantly.
• Paste as Markdown directly: You'll want to set up your own preferred shortcut for this one.
• Paste as JSON directly: Same here. Choose what feels natural for your workflow.

To customize these shortcuts, simply click in the shortcut field and press your desired key combination (Figure 6).

Fig. 6: Customizing shortcuts.

Remember that all shortcuts must start with the Windows key, Control, Alt, or Shift. Also, make sure that your shortcuts won't conflict with existing ones.

Note: The “Add custom action” uses generative AI, so we’re going to cover this feature in the next guide.

In Case of Emergency: Advanced Paste Shortcut

We’ve all been there. You configured something only to forget what it was the next day. If the same happens with the custom keyboard shortcuts you create in Advanced Paste, don’t worry. Before your long-term memory catches on, you can always use the “Open Advanced Paste shortcut” to activate a dropdown that allows you to select any conversion covered in this guide (Figure 7).

Fig. 7: Pasting with a dropdown menu (Windows + Shift + V).

Pasting as Plain Text

Let's start with the simplest but often most necessary transformation: stripping away all unwanted formatting.

Imagine you've copied some text from a website or Word document, and it's loaded with fonts, colors, and styling that you don't want or need. Instead of manually cleaning it up, Advanced Paste handles this instantly.

Here's your workflow: Copy any formatted text from wherever it lives, whether it’s a webpage, Word document, or any rich text source. Then press your configured plain text shortcut – for example the default Windows + Shift + Alt + V (Figure 8).

Fig. 8: Pasting as plain text with a keyboard shortcut (Windows + Shift + Alt + V).

Just like that, the text gets pasted without any formatting, fonts, colors, or styling cluttering up your document.

This becomes invaluable when you're working with plain text editors, code files, or forms that don't support rich formatting. No more wrestling with unwanted styling. Just clean, readable text.

Pasting as JSON

Now let's tackle something more sophisticated. If you work with APIs, data structures, or just need to organize information quickly, the JSON conversion feature is going to become your best friend.

The process is beautifully simple: Copy a list of items, key-value pairs, or any structured text that you want to turn into JSON format. Then use your configured keyboard shortcut for pasting as JSON (Figure 9).

Fig. 9: Pasting as JSON with a keyboard shortcut.

Alternatively, you can select “Paste as JSON” from the Advanced Paste menu.

What impresses me most about this feature is how intelligently it works. Advanced Paste doesn't just throw brackets around your text. It actually parses the structure and creates properly formatted JSON with correct syntax, quotes, and brackets. This means you can spend less time debugging malformed JSON and more time on the work that matters.

Pasting as Markdown

For anyone who works with documentation, README files, or content creation, Markdown conversion is going to feel like a superpower.

The beauty of this feature is how it preserves the structure of your original content while making it readable in plain text. Copy content with headings, lists, or emphasis from any source, then use your configured Markdown shortcut or select "Paste as Markdown" from the Advanced Paste window.

Watch as headers automatically become proper # syntax, bold text gets wrapped in ** formatting, and lists convert to clean Markdown bullet points (Figure 10).

Fig. 10: Pasting as Markdown with a keyboard shortcut.

This completely streamlines documentation workflows and content creation, especially if you're a developer working with Markdown files regularly. No more manual conversion. Just instant, properly formatted Markdown.

Coming Up Next: From Clipboard to Files + Prompt-Based Transformations

As powerful as these built-in conversions are, we've only scratched the surface of what Advanced Paste can do for you.

In the next article, we’ll cover clipboard-to-file conversion, which lets  you turn what’s the content of your clipboard into shareable files without opening another app.

Finally, we'll explore how to use natural language prompts to summarize lengthy content, translate text between languages, generate code snippets from descriptions, and apply custom styling transformations - all directly from your clipboard.

If you thought these basic conversions were time-savers, stay tuned and discover how to take your text processing workflow to the next level.