OLE, or whatever it's called these days, is magic - the other day, i set up a label printer and all the bundled programs it came with. I right-clicked to copy a jpeg in Chrome, hit paste in the label editor, without knowing if it would work - and it did. This is an image, going between a cross-platform Skia program and contracted fixed-function bundleware i'll never use twice, made by two completely different companies, and it... blew my mind a little. I have a resolved respect for the native platform capabilities. I mean, sure, it's just a tag in the clipboard code somewhere, but... fascinating.
Anyways, the point of that was, coercing the data type down to the simplest format isn't always the right thing to do. Word should be able to paste formatted text into anything else that handles formatted text (you can paste word formatted text into TinyMCE, that's also pretty impressive)
It's pretty likely that your example case involved the two programs both using a standard clipboard format (a bitmap), not something more sophisticated.
Anyways, the point of that was, coercing the data type down to the simplest format isn't always the right thing to do. Word should be able to paste formatted text into anything else that handles formatted text (you can paste word formatted text into TinyMCE, that's also pretty impressive)