For decades, the simple act of “copy and paste” has been the basis of digital productivity. It’s a simple command that everyone understands, but its limits have been a quiet drain on productivity for a long time. For advanced users, getting rid of formatting, changing the syntax, or summarizing a block of text often meant clumsy switching between apps or doing it by hand. But the clipboard, which is an invisible workhorse of our operating systems, has finally gotten the 21st-century upgrade it needs. Advanced Paste, a new feature in Microsoft’s PowerToys suite for Windows 11, makes copy-paste more than just a way to copy and paste. It has become an AI powerhouse, using the most recent advances in AI to do complex formatting, transformation, and analysis on the fly.
Even without AI, this tool’s basic features can help you get a lot more done. Using Ctrl + V to paste often brings over formatting from the source, which makes documents that are not consistent. 3 The default shortcut for Advanced Paste is 4$Win + Shift + V$. It directly addresses this with a set of reliable options, such as Paste as Plain Text, which removes all formatting from the source text right away. 5 Paste as Markdown lets developers and writers turn rich text elements like bolding and lists into portable Markdown syntax. Paste as JSON cleans up structured text so it can be easily added to code, getting rid of manual quotation and bracket errors. 6 These features alone make the clipboard a smarter and more useful tool for everyday tasks.
The real revolution, and the reason it is called a “AI Powerhouse,” is that it works better with large language models (LLMs). With this feature, the clipboard can do complicated, contextual changes with just one command, something that used to require opening a separate AI chat window or doing a lot of manual steps. For example, a user can copy a long email and then ask the AI to “Summarize this into three bullet points for a status meeting” using an Advanced Paste custom prompt. In the same way, a developer can copy a Python function and ask the AI to “Rewrite this code snippet in JavaScript.” The AI will then give them a working, properly formatted translation that they can use right away.
A recent important change has made this AI feature easier to use and more private. The first versions needed cloud-based API keys (like OpenAI), but the latest version of Advanced Paste now works with local AI runtimes like Foundry Local and the open-source Ollama framework. This change lets the tool use a PC’s dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This processing on the device is a game-changer. It speeds things up and lowers latency by a lot because data no longer has to go to the cloud. Most importantly, it keeps sensitive clipboard content safe on the user’s local machine, which improves privacy and saves money.
Advanced Paste also seamlessly adds powerful features like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which is then improved by its AI backend. 9 A user can copy a screenshot with text on it (like an error message or a chart label), use the “Image to Text” action to get the data, and then use a second AI action, all in the same workflow. This could be telling the AI to “Translate this error message into French” or “Get just the date and account number from this screenshot of an invoice.” This sequential “Image to Text $\rightarrow$ AI Transformation” feature combines two complicated tools into one easy-to-use workflow, making it much faster to get data out and change it.
The Advanced Paste feature is an important part of Microsoft’s bigger idea for a “agentic OS,” which is an operating system that has AI-driven automation built right into its everyday functions. Microsoft is giving users the tools they need to go beyond simple data transfer and into more complex data transformation by making the clipboard, which is the most common way to share data, smart. 10 You can now use the clipboard as a personalized macro engine because you can define custom actions, give them hotkeys, and link them together. 11 It’s no longer enough to just hit “Ctrl + C” and “Ctrl + V.” Windows 11’s Advanced Paste is a quiet revolution that shows how the biggest productivity gains often come from making a tool you already know how to use much smarter.
