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Ok, admit it…you did eat paste in school,
didn't you? You just had to know if it tasted as good as
it smelled, right? Well, although the process may
not satisfy your appetite quite as much, did you
know that you can also paste with your computer?
For example, suppose you had some text in one letter that you typed last week and now you'd
like to enter that same text into a new letter
you're typing this week. Rather than typing the text
over again, you can just copy and
paste the text into the new letter from the old.
Now, give it a try…
1 Copy some text
Type something on a page in any program. For example, open a new file in Microsoft
Word or WordPad and type something. Now, highlight the text you typed and choose Edit|Copy.
Nothing seems to happen, but it does! A copy of the
text you highlighted is copied into your
clipboard.
So, "what's a clipboard?" you ask. You
can think of it as a sort of hidey-hole in your
computer that stores a copy of the last item you put
there. That item stays there until you put something
else on the clipboard to replace it. So, right now
you have a copy of the text you just highlighted
on your clipboard.
2 Paste that text
Next, open another document and choose Edit|Paste. (Ahh, can't you just remember
the smell of that stuff right now?) The text you
highlighted and copied from the first document is
now sitting on the page of this new document.
Choose Edit|Paste again, and you get another copy of
the same text again…and again for as long as
you keep doing it (yes, this could go on all day, or
until you copy something new to the clipboard).
3 Copy and Paste pictures
Okay, so you knew you could copy text from one document to another. Did you
know that you can copy pictures from other
sources, too? You sure can. Open a graphics program
and open up that cute picture of Fido. Select the
picture and choose Edit|Copy. A copy of that
picture is now the current item in your computer's
clipboard. Open a new document, click to position the
cursor where you want the picture, and choose
Edit|Paste. Bingo…Fido's smiling back at you!
4 Cut instead of copy
Here's another one. Suppose you don't want to copy the text or picture, but instead
you actually want to remove it from it's original
location, so you can put it somewhere else. In
that case, you use the Cut command. Select your
item and choose Edit|Cut. The item disappears. But rest assured even though it's gone, it's not
forgotten. The item is sent to the clipboard, so you
can then paste it by choosing Edit|Paste just as
you can with items you copy.
5 Copy a picture of your screen
Okay, so maybe you knew that
too…but I'll lay odds you don't know that you can
actually take a picture of what's on your screen and put
that into a document to e-mail or print for
reference or, better yet, to send an actual snapshot of an
error dialog to someone for help. Yup! Your computer has a snapshot capability built right in
that can easily send a screen shot to your
clipboard which will allow you to then paste it wherever
you need it. Locate the button on your keyboard
called Print Scrn. That stands for Print Screen. In
the, ahem, old days that key allowed you to
quickly send the text from your screen to a printer.
Now, however, it sends a picture of your screen to
the clipboard. Give it a try. Display something
interesting on your monitor and press the Print
Scrn button. Again, seems like nothing happened, right? But it does.
6 Paste that screen shot
Open a new document page and use your trusty Paste command (Edit|Paste) to plop
the screen shot onto your page. If you don't want
the whole screen and only want a message box, for
example, hold down the Alt key while you press the Print Scrn button. That takes a shot of
just the active dialog box. Try it. Open a dialog box, such as
your Format|Font dialog box, and press Alt+Print
Scrn. Now paste that into a page. Cool, huh? Think of
how useful that could be when you need to show
some tech support guy that long error message you're
getting!
7 Try keyboard shortcuts
If all this mousing around is getting to
you, try out the easy shortcut keys for cut, copy
and paste. Ctrl+C is the shortcut to copy, Ctrl+X is
used to cut, and Ctrl+V is used to paste. These commands
work in virtually every Windows program, and many
programs even show the keyboard shortcuts on the menu so you
won't forget!
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