No Eating Paste

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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