Pasting Postings

[glennmac]

I need to become more posting proficient. How, specifically, do I:

1. Paste something I have created in Word into a posting here. I don't want it to be an attached file to the post, but to BE the post.

2. Paste one of the postings here into an email I can send to someone else. Occasionally, I would like to send some gem in the body of a post, or in an attachment, to someone else.

3. Paste a part of a posting by someone else here into one of my posts. Muhammad does it all the time -- reciting a question from someone's post and then answering it. Or do I just have to retype the other person's words into my post.

Glenn

 

[BobT]

Hi Glen,

You accomplish this text movement most quickly and easily by using the "copy" and "paste" keyboard capabilities of Windows. It will work in WinWord, WordPad, any text editor, Internet Explorer, etc. (Mac I don't do; Mac is similar, but slightly different keystrokes.).

1) Highlight the text you wish to copy. You do this by placing the mouse cursor at the first letter of the word or sentence to be copied.

2) Hold down the left mouse button as you drag the highlight over the entire text piece you wish to copy.

3) Once the appropriate text is highlighted, take your hand off the mouse, and hit the CTRL-C keys. This will copy the text and place it in your computer's memory ("clipboard").

4) Go to the place where you want the text inserted, place your mouse cursor where you want the text to begin, then hit CTRL-V, which will place the text for you. If you make a mistake, you can hit CTRL-Z, and it will back out the text placement.

The highlighted text placed in memory will stay there until you use the CTRL-C feature again.

You can also do this with the keyboard: place the cursor at the first letter, then hold down the shift key, and use the down arrow until all of the desired text is highlighted.

You can also do this with commands available in the right click mouse menu. Once you highlight the text, right click on the mouse, select "copy" and the go to the desired place for placement, right click again, and select "place".

If you want to copy the text, and also delete it from the original place it appears, use the CTRL-X key, which will delete the text, but hold it in the clipboard memory, and you can then place it elsewhere with CTRL-V.

This sounds a lot more complicated than it is. I provided such detailed instructions, because this is one of those things that seems so easy once it is done, but almost impossible to intuitively perform! We oldtimers who started in Basic and DOS know these kinds of things. Mousers have to learn as they go. Basically, the shorthand for this is, copy with CTRL-C, and place with CTRL-V. It takes a couple of times to get the hang of it, but once you do, you'll use it all the time.

Hope this helps.

BobT.

P.S. If you want to copy an entire page of text, everything on the page, just hit CTRL-A. Voila! Somewhere in Windows Help there is a list of keyboard shortcuts. Spend ten minutes learning them, and you'll save a whole bunch of time.

A Indiana Boy

 

[scruffy]

You can also highlight as mentioned in BobT's post, and when you release your mouse button, click on edit, click on copy, then move to your post and insert said copy to the post by clicking on edit/paste. For example, BobT's first two steps:
1) Highlight the text you wish to copy. You do this by placing the mouse cursor at the first letter of the word or sentence to be copied.

2) Hold down the left mouse button as you drag the highlight over the entire text piece you wish to copy.

Quick, simple with no extra items to remember. Course us Old Farts have to go with the easy steps and drop all these memory things!