Forum Discussion
BUG REPORT: Unwanted Asterisks Appearing When Copying Text from Copilot Output
To the Copilot Development Team and Community,
I am consistently encountering a bug that inserts unwanted asterisks (*) into text copied from Copilot's generated output. This issue is proving to be a significant workflow disruption.
Problem Description: When I copy any text (code, prose, comments, etc.) generated by Copilot and paste it into another application, asterisks are frequently embedded within the pasted content. This manifests in patterns such as:
Words or phrases being surrounded by asterisks (e.g., *this text*).
Random, solitary asterisks appearing within sentences or lines.
Impact: This requires manual removal of the extra asterisks after every paste operation, which significantly slows down development and documentation tasks, particularly when dealing with larger blocks of text.
Expected Behavior: Copied text should paste cleanly, retaining only the characters and formatting (if any) generated by Copilot, without the insertion of extraneous asterisks.
Request: Could the development team please investigate this issue? Knowing if this is a known bug, if there are specific settings causing this, or if a fix is in the pipeline would be highly beneficial.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Vivek Sharma
2 Replies
Hi Vivek, the reason for that is the asterisks are what Copilot uses to make text bold, **example bold text**, so it's exporting it exactly as Copilot input it. I agree though, that it would be better to not have them when using the copy function.
There's a few workarounds that can immediately help your workflow, however:
- You can highlight the text, and then copy and paste.
- You can ask Copilot to "only output plain text, no formatting", and then there will be no bold and no asterisks.
- If your task is repetitive, which it sounds like it is, you could build a Copilot Agent (in Copilot, select 'Create an agent') for that task and in its instructions request it "only output plain text, no formatting". That way you'll never need to mention it again, it will always output plain text.
Hope that helps.
Chris Lozeau
Hi Vivek, the reason for that is the asterisks are what Copilot uses to make text bold, **example bold text**, so it's exporting it exactly as Copilot input it. I agree though, that it would be better to not have them when using the copy function.
There's a few workarounds that can immediately help your workflow, however:
- You can highlight the text, and then copy and paste.
- You can ask Copilot to "only output plain text, no formatting", and then there will be no bold and no asterisks.
- If your task is repetitive, which it sounds like it is, you could build a Copilot Agent (in Copilot, select 'Create an agent') for that task and in its instructions request it "only output plain text, no formatting". That way you'll never need to mention it again, it will always output plain text.
Hope that helps!
Chris Lozeau
