OK, I get that I am extremely ridiculous, but I vaguely remembered a presentation I saw 12 years ago, and single-stepped frames through a bit under halfway through that video to check Microsoft& #39;s actual measured internal stats on this exact question https://twitter.com/AlanMCole/status/1298641971750240257">https://twitter.com/AlanMCole...

MS actually measured the number of times people clicked (not just Ctrl+Ved) on Paste-with-formatting vs Paste-Special in Office 2003 in a random week in 2007. And they collected all of that data into an absolutely enormous Excel spreadsheet that they used for driving UI decisions

They didn& #39;t just collect that, of course, they also collected a zillion other metrics, all for optimizing their UI (and that& #39;s how Office 2007 happened)

And when I say a lot of data, I mean a *lot* of data (this was in 2008)

Anyway, halfway through the presentation they show off their mega spreadsheet of most used commands in the major Office apps for a random sample week sometime in 2007 and scroll through it super quickly. But if you& #39;re sneaky you can peek at the data as it zooms on by.

And so anyway the winner, by fully a factor of 15 is people prefer pasting with formatting.

So there you go.

That& #39;s why the default is paste with formatting.

Bonus trivia: roughly 50% of people pasting do so via the button, not via Ctrl+V. Which is why the paste button in Office apps is so big. It& #39;s because people click it lots.