Cut & Paste or Copy & Paste

I've had several people wanting instructions on how to copy & paste, so I decided to send an email out to my tech list.  I'm sure some of this is old hat for some of you, so please excuse me if this email seems useless.

Cut and paste. Highlight some text by placing the mouse cursor at the beginning of the piece of text you want, then hold down the left mouse button and drag the cursor to the end of the piece of text, then release the button. Your text will be highlighted. Choose Cut or Copy from the Edit menu, and your text is copied into a holding area called the clipboard. If you chose Cut, the text will disappear from its original location; if you chose Copy the original text will be left untouched. Move the cursor to the area you want the text to appear in, choose Paste from the Edit menu, and the text will be copied from the Clipboard to the new location.

You can make this process faster by using the keyboard instead of the Edit menu. Hold down the CTRL key and press X to Cut (copy to the clipboard and remove from present location), C to Copy (copy to clipboard and leave original untouched), or V to Paste from the clipboard to the current location of the cursor. To remember which is which: X is a pair of scissors; C stands for Copy; think of V as a cake-icing dispenser or Paste.

Bear in mind that you can only have one thing in the clipboard at a time: if you cut one piece of text, and then a second without pasting the first one somewhere else, the first piece of text will be lost.  Whatever you place on the clipboard will remain there until you copy something else, or the computer is restarted or turned off.

This trick doesn't only work on text. You can use it on practically anything in Windows. If you can highlight it with your mouse, you can usually copy it to your clipboard and paste it wherever you like.  You can cut and paste files in Windows Explorer; pictures and bits of pictures in graphics packages like Paint, Photoshop or Paintshop Pro; or in practically any other program where you need to move things around.

Selecting files or folders

Select multiple items from a list (usually of files, to move or copy them all together). Click on the first file to select (highlight) it. Then hold down CTRL and click on a second file: both files will be selected. Keep holding down CTRL and click on as many files as you like: all will be highlighted. Release CTRL when you have selected all the files you want. If you click on an extra one by mistake, click on it again (still holding down CTRL) and it will be deselected.

If you want to select all of group of files in a list, click on the first one as before, then hold down SHIFT (instead of CTRL) and click on the last one. All the files between the first and last will be highlighted.

This is particularly useful when you are reorganizing your files, for example, going through old documents and removing ones you don't need any more, or moving them elsewhere. If you click on on one of a group of selected files and drag it somewhere (a different folder or the Recycle Bin for example), all the other selected files will come too.

Creating Shortcuts

Put shortcuts on your desktop. It's useful to have shortcuts to programs you use a lot on your desktop, readily available. To create a shortcut find its Start menu entry, right-click on the entry and choose Copy from the menu that pops up. Then right click on the desktop, and choose Paste Shortcut from the menu which appears.

Practically the first thing I do is put a shortcut to Windows Explorer on the desktop.

Another way to create a shortcut is to find the actual program with Windows Explorer or My Computer, click on it to highlight it, then press CTRL-C or choose Copy from the Edit menu. Paste as before, by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing Paste.

You can also use this technique to move files. Select the file to move and right-click as before, but this time choose Cut instead of Copy. The file won't disappear immediately, but its icon will become much fainter: when you paste it into its new location the original will disappear.