In this lesson you will learn:
   *- What the clipboard is
   *- What 'Copy and Paste' and 'Copy and Paste' are
   *- How to Cut and How to Copy
   *- How to paste

Back when all we had to communicate with were pens, pencils, and paper, it was a struggle to copy parts of something you wrote and move it to another place in your writing. It involved serious amounts of erasing, or possibly even starting over. The computer has allowed us a lot of leeway in our writing because individual letters, words, or entire paragraphs can be moved easily- even from one document to another. There are two ways this can be accomplished. The first (and the one you will use most often on the Internet) is 'Copy and Paste.' This means that some text will be copied from one location and it will be placed into another. The key word of this phrase is 'copy.'

1) To continue with this lesson it will be necessary to keep this browser window open but to also have a word processing program open as well. It can be as simple as Notepad or Windows Write, or you can use your favorite word processing program such as Word for Windows or WordPerfect. It doesn't matter, so long as it is capable of word processing.
Once you have both this browser and the word processing program running, re-size the two windows so each occupies about 50% of the screen. They can be side-by-side or top and bottom- whichever you choose. If necessary, open a new, blank document in the word program so you have a work area ready to go.
Now, with these two windows open, the first thing you need to do is copy something. Follow along:

Our Fathers brought forth

2) First we need to select some text by highlighting what we will be copying. Place you cursor in front of the word 'Our' in the above line. Hold down the left mouse button and while holding the mouse button down, move the cursor to just after the word 'forth' then release the mouse button. If you do this correctly, the line now appears as reverse text- the background appears dark blue and the text is white for the entire line of text. Click here to see an animation of what highlighting text looks like.

3) With the mouse buttons released, and the text still highlighted, hold down the 'CTRL' key on your keyboard and while holding it down, hit the 'C' key once. this CTRL+C key combination is the 'shortcut' for 'copy.'

What you have just done is to copy the text you highlighted. The copy of this text now is on the Windows Clipboard. The Clipboard is not a 'real' place, but a memory location in your computer. Think of it this way: you made a copy of the above text on a scrap of paper and then clipped the piece of paper to a clipboard. It rests there until you do somethng with it.

4) The next step is to use this copied bit of information from step 3. Place your cursor in the writing area of the word processing program you opened by left clicking anywhere in the document. With the mouse released, hold done the 'CTRL' key again, but this time hit the 'V' key on the keyboard. The CTRL+V key combination is the shortcut for 'Paste.' This takes whatever is on the clipboard and places a copy of it wherever the cursor is located at the time.
Be aware that I said that it pastes a COPY of what is on the clipboard. It does not remove the contents of the clipboard. You can prove this by repeating step 3. Another copy of the line of text on the clipboard will be pasted to your page. This can go on indefinitely! Keep hitting CTRL+V and you'll see what I mean.

5) Now repeat the above steps by copying and pasting the following line under the last one:

Four score and seven years ago

If you do this correctly, the document in the other window you are working on should look like this:

Our Fathers brought forth
Four score and seven years ago

Yes, I know that this is not correct- follow along...

6) Repeat this process one more time with this line, copying it from here, then pasting it under the previous two lines:

To this continent a new nation

Now you should see this in the other window:

Our Fathers brought forth
Four score and seven years ago
To this continent a new nation

7) That is obviously incorrect, so we need to fix it. In your word processing program, highlight the middle line (Four score and seven years ago]. With that line highlighted, hit 'CTRL+X' on your keyboard. This is what you have now:

Our Fathers brought forth
To this continent a new nation

8) WOW! It disappeared! Well, not really. It is not gone, but it has been moved to the clipboard. The CTRL+X combination is for the 'Cut' command. You have cut (removed) the highlighted text from the page, and it has been moved to the clipboard. Now place your cursor above the first line 'Our Fathers brought forth' and hit CTRL+V for paste. The line that was previously 'cut' now has been 'pasted' to the page. It should now look like:

Four score and seven years ago
Our Fathers brought forth
To this continent a new nation

Conclusion
Hints and Tips - Points to Remember A) The difference between Copy and Paste and Cut and Paste should now be obvious. Copy and Paste leaves the original text in place, and Cut and Paste removes the original text. Be aware that you can't 'Cut' text from someone's website- you can only Copy from it.

B) Another point that needs to be made here is the obvious weakness of the Windows Clipboard. It is capable of holding only a single piece of information at a time. When you copied the "Four score and seven years ago" line it replaced the "Our Fathers brought forth" on the clipboard. To remedy this, try the program "ClipMate." It allows you to copy multiple items and use these copied items at a later time at your desire.

C) Be aware that the clipboard can handle sentences, paragraphs, or entire pages of text and even graphic images in this same manner. I suggest that now that you have a good idea how this all works, you open a document of some sort (Or just copy this entire lesson and paste it into the word processor program) and play around with moving sentences and paragraphs around.

D) ALL information on the Internet is copyrighted even if it is not marked so. Be very careful about using any material that you have copied from the Internet or anywhere else for that matter.

E) These keyboard commands are universal and can be used in nearly all Windows applications that contain text, images, or anything that can be highlighted. There are some cases where the author has copy protected their work (in PDF files as an example) where the information cannot be copied.

F) Cut and paste can be quite handy in a number of ways. For example, let's say you are going to send a fairly long E-Mail message to a number of people. Type it once in your word processing program, edit it, and then Copy it (Ctrl/C) to the clipboard. Now open your E-Mail application and open a new mesage for each person to whom the letter will be sent. Choose 'Window/Tile' to display all the messages at once. Now, one at a time, place your cursor in the text area of the messages, left click once to choose that area, and hit CTRL/V to paste the text of the letter from the clipboard into the message.

G) You can select text from right to left as well.

H) The above methods work well for a sentence or two, but what about large amounts of text? These can be selected in this manner: Left click and release at the beginning of the text you wish to select. Scroll down (using the scroll bars in the browser if necessary, but don't mouse-click on the page again) until you can see the end of the desired selection. Hold down the SHIFT key on the keyboard and click at the end of the desired selection.

I) What if you accidentally hit CTRL+X in a document and delete text that you actually only wanted to copy? Without doing anything else, hit CTRL+V to past the deleted text back into the document in the same place.

J) When you have text highlighted in a document, be careful NOT to hit the Delete key on the keyboard. This deletes text. If that happens, hit CTRL+Z which is "Undo the last action."


Updated Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Copy and Paste Tutorial