Copying it clean, step by step
- Open the video on desktop and click more under the description.
- Scroll to the bottom of the description, click Show transcript. The panel opens on the right.
- Open the three-dot menu at the top of the panel, choose Toggle timestamps. Do this before selecting, not after.
- Click immediately before the first word.
- Scroll to the bottom of the panel with the scrollbar or the mouse wheel. Do not drag a selection.
- Hold Shift and click after the last word. Everything between the two clicks is now selected.
- Ctrl+C on Windows, Cmd+C on Mac.
Step five is the whole trick. A click-and-drag selection makes the panel auto-scroll, and on a ninety-minute video it accelerates until it overshoots the end. Anchor with a click, travel, then shift-click.
Getting rid of the timestamps
With the toggle on, every line arrives prefixed by a time code, and cleaning that up afterwards is a find-and-replace with a regular expression that most people would rather not write.
Turning them off in the panel first is the easy answer. If you already pasted a timestamped block somewhere and need it clean, the pattern to remove is a line-leading time code of the form 0:00 or 1:02:33, which in a regex-capable editor is ^\d{1,2}:\d{2}(:\d{2})?\s* replaced with nothing.
Keep the timestamps when the text is going into research notes you will come back to. Losing the ability to jump to the moment is worth more than the tidier paragraph.
Pasting into Word, Docs or Notion
YouTube's transcript panel is HTML, so a plain paste carries styling and line breaks with it. Paste as plain text instead: Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows, Cmd+Shift+V on Mac. In Word the equivalent is Paste Special, then Unformatted Text.
Expect one line per caption block regardless. Caption tracks are stored in short fragments, so the paste arrives broken up rather than as flowing paragraphs. Reflowing that into prose is a job for a find-and-replace or an LLM, and it is the main reason people move to a tool that groups lines into sentences before copying.
For a PDF, paste into a document and export. There is no direct transcript-to-PDF path on YouTube, and any tool promising one is doing exactly this behind the scenes.
Copying on a phone
The YouTube app shows a transcript but makes selection painful, and there is no select-all. Two workarounds:
- Open the video in a mobile browser and request the desktop site. The Show transcript button returns and behaves like the desktop panel.
- Use a paste-the-link website. They are ordinary web pages with a copy button, so they work fine on iOS and Android.
Chrome extensions do not run on mobile, so any guide telling you to install one on a phone is describing a desktop workflow.
The one-click version
Everything above exists because YouTube's panel has no copy button. An extension adds one, and that is genuinely the entire value proposition: click the icon, click Copy, paste. Timestamps come along or not depending on a toggle, and a second button saves the same text as a .txt file.
Whether that is worth an install depends on frequency. Once a month, the shift-click trick is fine and you now know it. Several times a day, the manual route is a small tax you pay over and over.