7 January 2006

Paste Special

The ability to copy text from one program and paste it into another is one of Window’s most powerful features. Instead of having to retype the contents of an online document, you can simply highlight it, copy it, paste in your document, and claim it for your very own. This is cyber-plagiarism at its best.

Of course, this operation has its drawbacks, too. For example, if you paste a Web page into a word processor, you’ll get all of the formatting, hyperlinks, and some strange spatial arrangements. Copying text from WordPerfect to Word, or vice versa, can result in alignment and spacing of pasted text that makes it very difficult to read. Fortunately, many Windows programs - such as Word, WordPerfect, Excel, and Publisher – have a feature called Paste Special that allows you to paste the contents of the clipboard into a document in a variety of forms.

Basics of Paste Special
As most of you already know, before you can paste text into a document, you must first copy it into that special place Microsoft likes to call the “clipboard.” Naturally, before you can copy the text, you must highlight it.

Highlight the Text
This simple procedure can be accomplished with either mouse or keyboard. To highlight text using a mouse, place the cursor to the left of the beginning of the desired text, and then click the left mouse button. While holding down the button, move the mouse down and to the right to highlight the text. Let go of the left mouse button, but do not click anywhere else, yet.

With the keyboard, you can use the arrow keys to navigate to the beginning of the desired text. Next press and hold one of the two shift keys. Press the down arrow or the page down key to highlight the text. Use the right arrow to continue to the end of a line. When all is highlighted, let go of the shift key, but don’t press another key, yet.

Sometimes, you want all or most of the text in a document. Sometimes the text on a Web page is difficult to grab. Simply click the mouse somewhere in the middle of the text. Press and hold the Ctrl key, and then press and release the “A” key. This will highlight all of the text.

Copy the Desired Text
Now that you have the text highlighted, you can store it temporarily in the computer’s memory (the clipboard). To copy the text, press and hold the Ctrl key, and then press and release the “C” key. You could also click on the Edit menu, and then Copy.

Paste Special
To use the feature in your destination program, click Edit, and then Paste Special (not Paste). When you do, you will be given a choice of how to paste the selected text. If all you need are the words and punctuation marks, choose “Unformatted Text.”

The Unformatted Text option will paste bare, unformatted text only. All other formatting information will be stripped out, including bold, underlining, italics, indents, bullets, hyperlinks, etc. If the text you are pasting had various fonts or complex formatting, you will have to manually change fonts and recreate all this formatting. Although doing this can be time-consuming, usually it will be easier than trying to fix a document.

Paste Special in Excel
A nifty little feature of Microsoft Excel is the multitude of options you’ll get when you highlight one or more cells in a spreadsheet and then copy the information into the clipboard. Among other things, you can control column widths so the pasted data matches the copied data. You can remove formulas by pasting values instead. You can copy data that are enclosed in boxes and paste the cells without the borders.

Experiment with the Paste Special feature of your favorite programs. Remember, whenever you are “borrowing” text from another source, you want only the words and none of the fancy formatting. Choose Paste Special, Unformatted Text, and be done with it.