Say that you’ve copied a few paragraphs from Westlaw to Word, and they include yellow and red flags and similar items indicating the status of various cases (e.g., whether they’ve been questioned, overruled, appealed, and the like). That can be helpful for your own reading, but may not be so good if you want to use the passages in a brief, in a course handout, and so on. You can copy and paste the text without formatting, but that will get rid of italics as well, which isn’t optimal. How do you just get rid of the flags?
I just recently learned it (though I probably should have known it earlier): Just do a search-and-replace for ^g (for graphics) and replace it with nothing. Voila.