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You can't paste a picture into your Web browser, and you can't paste MIDI music information into your word processor. But you can put graphics into your word processor, paste movies into your database, insert text into GraphicConverter, and combine a surprising variety of seemingly dissimilar kinds of data. 7.1.1. Cut, Copy, and PasteThe original copy-and-paste procedure of 1984 putting a graphic into a word processorhas come a long way. Most experienced Mac users have learned to trigger the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands from the keyboard, quickly and with out even thinking. Here's how the process works:
The most recently cut or copied material remains on your Clipboard even after you paste, making it possible to paste the same blob repeatedly. Such a trick can be useful when, for example, you've designed a business card in your drawing program and want to duplicate it enough times to fill a letter- sized printout. On the other hand, whenever you next copy or cut something, whatever was already on the Clipboard is lost forever.
7.1.2. Drag-and-DropAs useful and popular as it is, the Copy/Paste routine doesn't win any awards for speed. After all, it requires four steps. In many cases, you can replace that routine with the far more direct (and enjoyable) drag-and-drop method. Figure 7-1 illustrates how this works. Note: Most Cocoa programs (Section 5.8) require you to press the mouse button for a split second before beginning to drag. (This delay is shorter in 10.4 than it was in 10.3, however.) Virtually every Mac OS X program works with the drag-and-drop technique, including TextEdit, Stickies, Mail, Sherlock, QuickTime Player, Preview, iMovie, iPhoto, and Apple System Profiler, not to mention commercial programs like Microsoft applications, America Online, and so on. 7.1.2.1. When to use drag-and-dropAs shown in Figure 7-1, drag-and-drop is ideal for transferring material between windows or between programs. It's especially useful when you've already copied something valuable to your Clipboard, since drag-and-drop doesn't involve (and doesn't erase) the Clipboard.
Its most popular use, however, is rearranging text within a single document. In Word or AppleWorks, for example, you can rearrange entire sections, paragraphs, sentences, or even individual letters , just by dragging thema wonderfully efficient editing technique. Tip: When you use drag-and-drop to move text within a document, the Mac moves the highlighted text, deleting the highlighted material from its original location. If you press Option as you drag, however, you make a copy of the highlighted text. 7.1.2.2. Drag-and-drop to the desktopYou can also use drag-and-drop in the one program you use every single day: the Finder itself. As shown in Figure 7-2, you can drag text, graphics, sounds, and even movie clips out of your document windows and directly onto the desktop. Once there, your dragged material generally becomes an icon called a clipping file .
When you drag a clipping from your desktop back into an application window, the material in that clipping reappears. Drag-and-drop, in other words, lets you treat your desktop itself as a giant, computer-wide pasteboard an area where you can temporarily stash pieces of text or graphics as you work. Tip: When the material you drag to the desktop contains nothing but an Internet address, such as an email address or Web page URL, Mac OS X gives it a special icon and a special function: an Internet location file . See Section 19.9 for details. 7.1.3. Export/ImportWhen it comes to transferring large chunks of informationespecially address books, spreadsheet cells , and database recordsfrom one program to another, none of the data-transfer methods described so far in this chapter does the trick. For these purposes, use the Export and Import commands found in the File menu of almost every database, spreadsheet, email, and address-book program. (In some programs, the Save As command serves this function.) These Export/Import commands aren't part of Mac OS X, so the manuals (if any) of the applications in question should be your source for instructions. For now, however, the power and convenience of this feature are worth notingit means that your four years' worth of collected addresses in, say, your old email program can find its way into a newer program, like Palm Desktop, in a matter of minutes. |
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