Ever find it slightly annoying when you copy and paste text in the new versions of Skype and you get an unwanted Name and Timestamp “image” included in your sentence, rather than just plain text?

Notice the fancy (unwanted) image that got pasted into my conversation, rather than just the letters “brb”? Luckily, there’s an option to turn it off.

I’m using the Skype 5 beta. Your version of Skype may be slightly different. Go into your Tools->Options and look for the IM & SMS Tab. Should look something like this:



Click on the IM & SMS button/tab and you’ll should see this default screen in the right hand side:

There’s nothing much to look at until you show the Advanced Options. That’s where all the magic is kept.

Now you’ll see what we’re looking for. What you want to modify is the “Pressing Ctrl+V will” setting (that’s the equivalent of “Paste” for all you users who don’t know keyboard shortcuts). Change that option to “Paste message as plain text“. That should be all you need.

Now you’ll notice that, while the Name and Timestamp information is still there, that ugly image is gone. It seems that there is a bug in Skype where, if you copy/paste a subset of text in a sentence, you won’t get that timestamp information at all. Unfortunately, for this example, the entire sentence was “brb” and the timestamp occurs.