Why ChatGPT text has ** and ## symbols, and how to get rid of them
You copy an answer from ChatGPT, paste it into Word or an email, and it arrives full of ** and ## symbols. Nothing is broken. The answer was written in Markdown, and the place you pasted it into does not read Markdown.
What the symbols mean
Markdown is a way to mark formatting with plain characters. Two asterisks around a phrase mean bold. One or more hash signs at the start of a line mean a heading. Hyphens and numbers start list items, and vertical bars draw the columns of a table.
Chat apps hide all of this. They read the Markdown and show you the formatted result, so you never see the symbols until you copy the text somewhere else.
- **text** is bold text.
- *text* is italic text.
- ## Title is a heading.
- - item is a bullet point, and 1. item is a numbered one.
- | a | b | is a row of a table.
- `text` is code.
Why they show up when you paste
The copy button under an answer copies the Markdown source, because that is the most complete version of the answer. Apps that understand Markdown, such as Notion or Obsidian, turn it back into formatting. Word, Outlook, Excel, and most web forms do not, so they show the characters exactly as they are.
Selecting the text with the mouse and copying it avoids the symbols, but it can bring the fonts, colors, and spacing of the chat page instead, which is a different mess.
Two ways to fix it
If you want the formatting, convert the Markdown before you paste. The converter turns headings, bold text, lists, and tables into real formatting for Word or Google Docs, and tables into cells for Excel or Google Sheets.
If you want no formatting at all, strip the symbols. The plain text mode removes the markers and keeps the words, which is what you need for a form field, a chat message, or a plain email.
- For a document, use the Word or Google Docs converter.
- For a spreadsheet, use the Excel / Sheets converter.
- For plain text, use the plain text mode with “Strip markdown markers” turned on.
Can you stop ChatGPT from using them?
You can ask for an answer “in plain text with no Markdown”, and it usually works for that one answer. The formatting tends to come back in later answers, and a long answer without any structure is harder to read. Converting at the end is more reliable than fighting the format on the way.