Reviewing Cut, Copy, and Paste in Excel

If you have mastered the Copy, Cut, and Paste commands in Word, those commands in Excel will be a breeze for you. As with Word and the other Office products, Excel uses the Office Clipboard to hold data that you are copying, cutting, and pasting from within or between worksheets. Alternatively, if you open two workbooks at the same time and display both on your screen (by selecting Window, Arrange), you can easily copy, cut, and paste between the two workbooks by dragging content from one worksheet to the other.

To copy data from one location to another, select the cell or cells you want to copy and then click the Copy toolbar button (or press Ctrl+C) to copy the worksheet contents to your Clipboard. The contents stay in the original location because you elected to copy and not cut the cells . To paste the Clipboard contents to another location, click the cell to indicate the upper-left corner of the target range. Then, click the Paste toolbar button (or press Ctrl+V). Excel overwrites the target cells with the pasted contents, so be sure of the paste target when you paste Clipboard data.

As with all Office products, you can send up to 24 distinct items to the Office Clipboard and paste one or more of the copied items into your worksheet. When you copy or cut more than one worksheet item to the Office Clipboard, the Clipboard task pane appears to display the Office Clipboard contents. You can paste any of the Office Clipboard task pane's items to your worksheet. As with Word and the other Office products, you can copy and paste text, numbers , formulas, pictures, Internet hyperlinks , and Media Gallery clips. The Clipboard task pane appears by default. However, if its display has been turned off, you can redisplay it by choosing Edit, Office Clipboard.

You can continue pasting the copied item to other worksheets as long as you keep selecting a target location and pressing Ctrl+V.

Excel supports drag-and-drop editing, so after you select the cells to copy, press Ctrl and drag the selection to its new location. You must drag the selection by pointing to one of the selection edges; if you attempt to drag from the center of a range, Excel modifies which cells are selected. When you release your mouse button and the Ctrl key, Excel pastes the contents to the target location. Of course, drag-and-drop editing works only when you can see both the source and the target copy and paste locations.

To cut contents and place them elsewhere, just select the cells that you want to cut and click the Cut toolbar button (or press Ctrl+X). Excel removes the selection from its original location and places the selection on your Clipboard. You then can paste the Clipboard contents elsewhere. In effect, cutting and pasting performs a movement of the selected data. If you want to move the selection with your mouse, drag the selection without first pressing Ctrl as you did when copying the contents.

If you want to drag and drop data between two workbooks' worksheets but you only have one worksheet displayed, press the Alt key before dragging your selection. When you drag the selection over the target worksheet's tab, Excel opens that worksheet, and you can drop the dragged contents to the open worksheet.