Welcome back to our course on Word 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at Cut, Copy, and Paste.
And these are the techniques that we use in order to either move content within a document
or between documents or to make additional copies of content.
You can actually Cut, Copy, and Paste all sorts of things in a Word document, including
graphics, shapes, photos, and so on.
We’re primarily going to be concerned at the moment with text.
But what you learn about text pretty much applies to everything else as well.
In order for it to be straightforward to see what I’m doing here, I have formatted one
paragraph in this document differently from the others.
I’ve colored it red, given it a different font, given it a different font size.
And that’s the paragraph that we’re going to Cut or Copy.
Now you should be familiar with the concept of Cut and Copy, if you’ve used Windows
software before.
So I’m not going to go into that in any detail, but I am going to show you two or
three of the ways of doing this in Word.
Initially, we’re going to use keyboard and mouse.
So first of all, let’s select that paragraph, quite straightforward.
Move the cursor off to the right, double click, that selects the whole paragraph.
We don’t need the mini toolbar on this occasion.
And on the Home tab the left most group, there’s a group there Clipboard with a set of buttons.
And these buttons if you use the Ribbon buttons for this, they’re ones you’ll use a lot.
The top one, the pair of scissors of course is Cut; the next one, the two sheets of paper
is Copy; then we have one that we’re going to look at a little bit later on, that’s
Format Painter; and then we have the Paste button.
Now, of course, as you’ll know, the Paste button won’t be available until we have
something on the Clipboard to Paste.
Now the first thing I want to do here is to Copy that paragraph to the Clipboard.
So I’m going to click the Copy button.
Of course, nothing visible happens, other than the fact that the Paste button becomes
enabled.
So now let me move the cursor down to a point a couple of paragraphs further down.
I’m going to click in front of the word Video in that paragraph there.
I don’t have anything selected now, I just have the cursor flashing in front of the word
Video and then I just click on the Paste button.
And that makes a copy of that paragraph in that position.
Now, of course, if I’ve copied something to the Clipboard when I’ve pasted it again
it’s still there.
So I could make another copy.
Let me scroll down the document, put the cursor in there, and click on Paste again, and there’s
an additional copy of the same piece of text.
Now I’ve just undone the two pastes that we did and this time instead of doing a copy
and then pastes, I’m going to do a Cut and Paste.
So again I’m going to select that same red paragraph.
I’m going to do it just with the mouse here, so I’m just going to drag over it.
When I drag I make sure that I drag to the beginning of the following paragraph without
actually selecting anything in the following paragraph.
Now instead of clicking on Copy, I’m going to click on Cut.
And when I click on Cut, the paragraph actually disappears from its original position.
Now if I move down to a different location and click on Paste effectively, I have moved
the paragraph to a new location.
So Cut and Paste removes the original and effectively moves it to somewhere else.
Let me now put the cursor a couple of paragraphs below that and click on Paste again and, of
course, that will still work but now I get an additional copy of the text.
Now if you’ve used Windows software before, you’ll be familiar with the keyboard shortcut
equivalent for these three operations.
I’ve got that same paragraph selected here.
If I hover over the buttons in the Clipboard Group, it actually shows you the keyboard
shortcuts as well.
So Cut is Control and X, Copy is Control and C, Paste is Control and V. And of course,
they work in exactly the same way.
If you like to use keyboard shortcuts, then they work absolutely fine in Word 2013.
Now I’m going to deselect that paragraph and I’m going to show you the same operation
using touch.
For the purposes of this, I’m going to switch back on the touch mode, give myself a little
bit more space around the buttons.
I’m going to use the buttons on the minibar at the moment.
So I’m going to tap within that paragraph and I’m going to drag the handles from,
make sure I’ve got the whole of the paragraph selected.
And now if I tap I bring up the minibar and one of the options on the minibar is Cut.
So I’ve obviously got Copy as well.
Click on Cut.
Now all I’ve got to do is position the cursor where I want the cursor to be.
So let me tap down at the beginning of another paragraph down here and if I want to just
now do a Paste from there, I can either bring up the minibar or I can use the Paste button
on the Ribbon.
So let me use the Paste button on the Ribbon, tap on Paste, and it’s pasted in.
Now as with many other touch operations in Word 2013, it takes a little bit of getting
used to.
But I think, particularly, if you use the touch settings on the Ribbon, you soon get
the hang of it and it works absolutely fine.
So now I’m back in keyboard and mouse mode and what I’m going to do is show you a couple
of other very specific things related to Cut, Copy, and Paste.
I’m again going to Copy that red paragraph.
So I’ve copied it, Control-C to copy it to the Clipboard.
Now instead of putting the cursor in front of one of the paragraphs above it, the one
beginning with the word Video, I’m going to select that paragraph.
But bear in mind the paragraph on the Clipboard is the red one, although I’ve selected that
one.
If I now Paste and this time I’m going to use the keyboard shortcut of Control-V, what
happens is that the paragraph on the Clipboard replaces the one I’ve selected.
Whenever you do a Paste, you replace whatever is selected.
If you’ve got nothing selected then what you’ve got on the Clipboard is inserted
at the point where the cursor is.
But if you’ve got something selected as I have here, then that is obliterated, it’s
deleted by the Paste.
So here goes the Paste, Control-V, and that paragraph has now gone.
The next thing I’m going to show you is also I think a pretty useful thing to be able
to do.
Let’s suppose I’m still working with this red paragraph here.
What I’m going to do is to select the paragraph and this time instead of copying it or cutting
it, all I do is click with the mouse button, the left mouse button once and hold inside
the paragraph and now move the mouse up two or three paragraphs, say to the beginning
of the paragraph with the word Video at the beginning again.
Release the mouse button and what I’ve effectively done is a Cut and Paste but this was a move
by dragging.
So I’ve moved that paragraph by dragging it elsewhere in the document.
So that paragraph is still selected.
This time before I click within it with the mouse, I’m going to hold the Control key
down, click within it, now drag again up three paragraphs.
I’m going to go before the paragraph that begins with the word To, release the mouse,
and this time because I held the Control key down, I’ve actually made a copy of that
paragraph.
So that’s an equivalent of Copy and Paste just by using dragging with the mouse and
in that case holding the Control key down.
Now so far we’re talking about Cut, Copy, and Paste.
We’ve really been cutting, copying, and pasting whole paragraphs.
Of course, you don’t have to do whole paragraphs, you could do individual characters, words,
sentences, and as we’ll see later pictures, graphics, and so on.
But there’s another aspect of Cut, Copy, and Paste which we do need to look at briefly
now and that is the fact that when you Paste something, there are often additional factors
that you need to take into account.
Now I’ve got two copies of the paragraph Beginning Themes and Styles and I’ve made
them very different.
This one is in a different font, it’s green, smaller point size.
If I click inside that paragraph, you can see it’s the Black Oak standard font and
it’s 8 point.
If I click inside the red one, its Algerian 12 point and the regular one is Calibri 11
point.
Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to Paste part of what’s in the green paragraph
into the red paragraph; just watch what happens.
So let’s take, start at the word Theme.
I’m going to just take a few of the words.
I’m going to Copy them, so that’s Control-C. And then I’m going to put the cursor inside
the red paragraph somewhere, say to the right of the word Graphics there, and then Paste
with a Control-V.
Now note how the formatting is kept.
Note that the green has been kept, the fonts been kept, every aspect of the formatting
there has been kept.
Now let me Undo that and I’m now going to do the same thing but in a different way.
Now note that the content of the Clipboard hasn’t changed.
I still have that green text on the Clipboard, but instead of using Control-V to Paste that
text into the red paragraph, I’m going to go the Home tab, Clipboard Group, Paste, and
I’m going to use one of the options on the bottom arrow there.
So I’ll click on the drop down and I get three Paste options.
The first one, Keep source formatting.
Now notice that you get a live preview of what keep source formatting would do.
See how there you can see the green words, theme, the pictures, charts, and SmartArt
in the red paragraph.
That’s basically the default.
That is what the Paste did just now.
But if I go to the second option which is described as Merge Formatting, then I still
get the same words pasted but the formatting is merged with what’s there already, which
basically means in this case that the formatting that’s in what I’ll call the destination
paragraph, the red paragraph, overrides what’s in the text already.
So the fact, for instance, that we’re using the Algerian font in the red paragraph will
override the font in the text we’re about to paste.
So when we do the paste, we actually get a paste with the same format as the destination
paragraph, the red paragraph.
So you have two options, you’ve got the option of I want to Copy and Paste some text
and keep the source formatting or I want to Copy and Paste some text but I want it to
be basically the target, the destination format.
Now it’s called Merge Formatting because sometimes there will be a defined formatting
element in the target or the source which is not in the other.
And in that case, the formats will be merged; so where there is a definition that will be
used.
Now we’ll be looking at formats in quite a bit more detail later on in the course but
for the moment, I just need to make it clear to you that sometimes when you’re copying
and pasting and the formats are different, then you will need to be careful which Paste
option you choose.
What I’d like to do quickly now is to show you a couple of other things in relation to
Cut, Copy, and Paste that are worth knowing.
I’m not going to go into them in detail.
They’re both things that you could certainly investigate a little more yourself, but knowing
they’re there I think is the most important thing of all.
If you look at the Home tab, Clipboard Group on the left, there’s a little dialog box
Launcher in the bottom right corner.
Its screen tip is Clipboard and if you click on that, it shows you what’s on the Clipboard.
The Clipboard is currently empty.
If you’re used to doing Copy and Paste in Windows, you’ll be aware that you can Copy
and Paste items in much the same way as we’ve already done in this section.
Let me again select that paragraph and then Control-C, copy it to the Clipboard.
I actually see it appear on that Clipboard.
This is the Office Clipboard here.
Now let me take another paragraph, say the one two down from there, the one that begins
Save time in Word, let me copy that.
And what you find is that you can have multiple items on the Office Clipboard.
Let’s take the red one next, Copy, Control-C. I’ve now got three.
And if I wanted to paste something, say, before the word Reading in that paragraph, I could
choose any one of these three to paste.
The most recent is at the top; that would be the red one.
The oldest is down there, the bottom; that will be the green one.
So let’s say Paste and I get the green one pasted in.
So you can have multiple items on the Office Clipboard at any one time.
You can in fact paste them all if you wanted.
There’s a Paste All button.
And of course, you can clear the Office Clipboard by clicking on Clear All.
And finally something that we’re going to be using later on anyway, but I’ve got this
document that I’m working on here with all these mixed formats.
Supposing that while I’m working on this I decide to create a new document and work
on a new document at the same time.
Very straightforward way of creating a new blank document, as you should know by now,
Control-N. And with my new document if I go to the Clipboard drop down again, I still
see that my three copied paragraphs are there.
If I did Paste All, of course, they all get pasted into the new document.
And that’s a pretty neat way of copying a number of pieces of content from one document
to another.
Although, of course, I could quite easily copy them one at a time, reorder them in whatever
order I wanted, and so on.
So that’s it on Cut, Copy, and Paste for now.
I’ll see you in the next section.