You know how annoying it is when you paste something into Gmail and it keeps the weird formatting? I finally pulled out the Google and discovered that in Chrome you can just press Ctrl-Shift-V to paste something just as text.

http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/09/tip-just-text-please.html

Update:
If you already pasted the text into Gmail and you want to remove formatting, click the “remove formatting” button on the top right (though it won’t change the font). (Hat-tip:Lifehacker)