No, I didn't read your prompt and assumed it was windows. in general, Excel for windows is the preferred version even though MacOS is a better operating system. however, if you insist to keep using the Mac, here are the steps. by the way, chatGPT can answer all excel questions.

I understand your issue. In Excel for Mac, when you copy and paste a cell with formatting, the Format Painter icon may appear automatically next to the cell you just pasted. This can be annoying, especially if you do not want to apply the same formatting to other cells.

To disable this feature, you can try the following steps:

Open Excel and click on the "Excel" menu at the top of the screen. Click on "Preferences" and select "Edit". Uncheck the box next to "Show Paste Options button when content is pasted". Close the Preferences window. This should prevent the Format Painter icon from appearing automatically when you paste formatted cells. Instead, you will have to manually select the Format Painter icon from the toolbar or use the keyboard shortcut "Command+Option+C" to apply formatting to other cells.

If this solution does not work, you may need to disable the Smart Cut and Paste feature in Excel. To do this, follow these steps:

Open Excel and click on the "Excel" menu at the top of the screen. Click on "Preferences" and select "Edit". Uncheck the box next to "Smart Cut and Paste". Close the Preferences window. Disabling Smart Cut and Paste may help prevent the Format Painter icon from appearing automatically. However, this feature may also disable other useful editing features, so use it with caution.