When I first started using PCs, one of the most celebrated features in word processing was Cut and Paste. If you don't remember correction tape, this has no meaning to you. But before Cut and Paste, documents were messy and manual. Edits were cause for panic. It was a cold, mouseless world. But the sun shone brightly on all documents when Cut and Paste arrived.

It was off to the races with features after that. The features in Microsoft Office have expanded and bloated to the point where we don't even know what they all are. I might even be able to get Outlook to start my dinner or Excel to dispense allowances, but unless I've typed the magic words into the help system, I'll never know. Sometimes I'm very happy about that. I only need about twenty features in Word, give or take five. I won't get a promotion by knowing any of the other ways I can create a document. But I really need Cut and Paste to work.

In today's world of sharing information from multiple sources, the urge to Cut or Copy is even greater. Unfortunately, if you are creating Word documents or Outlook emails, there is no telling what will happen after you've clicked Paste. Text may jump into triple spacing, fonts move from Times New Roman to Arial or Courier New and all bets are off as to whether you will have paragraph marks where they should be. And don't even get me started on Word style sheets - those elusive wizards lurking in the background of your document asking you to conform to some unnamed standard which you never asked for. Accidentally take one document into another with varying styles and the tiny font fairies wave their magic wands for the sheer pleasure of seeing your face when you realize every header has disappeared and your document is now set entirely in Wingdings.

Why, Microsoft? A simple, beautiful feature, Cut and Paste, has been corrupted by "more features" and embedded graphics, HTML codes and other background issues than I can name. These days, I just save new documents as text, close them and re-open them so I can work with unadulterated words. Just a few nice words on the page with no lurking "code" in the background which I can't see, edit or remove.

I know there are other solutions and I could leave the mainstream of MicrosoftLand, but that's not really practical in my office. So here's a gentle appeal to Microsoft and other major developers out there: save the pristine and simple beauty of Cut and Paste and make life easier for the humble creators and users of moderately simple documents and emails like me. We're not stupid - we just want it to work.