When you cut or copy data in a non-Office program, Windows stores the data in a special memory location called the Clipboard. When you run the Paste command, Windows grabs the data from the Clipboard and adds it to the document. This has worked well for Windows users for many years, but all of us have run into the Clipboard's glaring weakness: it can hold only one item at a time. If you cut or copy something else, the previous data is discarded. The Office programmers have been trying to fix this weakness since Office 2000 by implementing a Clipboard replacement called the Office Clipboard that's capable of storing multiple cut or copied items. Early incarnations of the Office Clipboard were clunky and barely usable, so they were ignored by most users. The Office 2003 version of the Office Clipboard is the best one yet, but it's still a relatively limited tool. Like its Windows cousin, at its most basic level the Office Clipboard is a don't-reinvent-the-wheel device. In other words, if you've created something that workswhether it's a bit of polished prose, an attractive graphic, or a complex worksheet formulaand you'd like to reuse it, don't waste time re-creating the data from scratch. Instead, you can send the existing data to the Office Clipboard and then insert a copy of it into a different document or even into a different application altogether. Unlike its Windows cousin, the Office Clipboard can store up to 24 items at a time, even items cut or copied from non-Office programs. The Office Clipboard is implemented as part of the Task pane and it appears in the following circumstances:
Figure 6.1 shows an example of the Office Clipboard with several items stored. The items are listed with the most recently added at the top of the list. Figure 6.1. The Office 2003 version of the Office Clipboard can store up to 24 items.
Here are the techniques to use to work with items on the Office Clipboard:
Setting Office Clipboard OptionsIf you plan to use the Office Clipboard regularly, it comes with a few options that enable you to control some aspects of its behavior. To see these settings, click the Options button:
Pasting Data in a Different FormatIf the Office Clipboard has a glaring weakness of its own, it's that it can't paste data in different formats. You can occasionally use the Paste Options smart tag to select the paste format, but this aspect of Office 2003 is inconsistent and poorly implemented. If you want to control the format, you need to return to the Windows Clipboard. Clipboard data usually has a default format that's used when you select the Paste command. For example, if you send a piece of a Paint image to the Clipboard and then paste it into Word, the image is inserted using the bitmap format. However, there are often multiple formats for a given data type. An Excel worksheet range can be copied as RTF text, a bitmap, HTML, a Worksheet object, and more. If you'd like to use a different format when you paste data, the Office applications all have a Paste Special command on the Edit menu. Selecting this command displays a dialog box similar to the one shown in Figure 6.2. Here, the As box lists the various formats that are available. You select the one you want and click OK. (However, you need to be careful that you don't embed the data. In many cases, the first item shown in the As list is an Object format. If you select this item, Windows pastes the data as an embedded object. I'll discuss this in more detail when I talk about linking and embedding later in this chapter.) Figure 6.2. The Paste Special dialog box gives you access to the other formats available with the data you're pasting from the Clipboard.
Using the Clipboard Contents in a Replace OperationThe Replace command that appears on the Edit menu of the Office application is normally used to replace text or formatting. However, you can also use it to replace text with an image or just about any other data by using the Clipboard. For example, you might want to replace all instances of the word "Time" with an image of a clock; or you may want to replace some instances of your company name with your company logo. Here are the steps to follow:
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