Cut, Copy and Paste:
This is a particular way many computer
applications
have of moving or copying
text, or
other data.
In
Windows
Applications
it is called Cut and Paste or
Copy and Paste, and the material being moved or
copied is stored temporarily in a
buffer
called the
Clipboard.
Cutting and copying both put a copy of the selected text or item onto
the Clipboard, but Cut removes it from its original place, whilst
Copy leaves it there.
Paste means that you copy the contents of the clipboard into an
application. For example, you may have copied material from a wordprocessor
which you paste into an email.
You can copy and paste a whole file, or you can select part of a file and
just copy that. You can practise this first by copying and pasting the
whole of this web page.
Normally, you can copy a web page, but not paste into it. Here I provided a
practice area
that you can paste into. Normally, if you copied text from a
web page, you would then switch to a wordprocessor and paste into that.
To copy and paste the whole of this page:
- go to the Edit menu (at the top, next to file), and click Select
All. This should highlight the whole page.
- go to the Edit menu, and click Copy. You will not see anything
happen, but the text from the page should now be stored in the clipboard.
- Go to the
practice area
(below), place the insertion point in the area
and click
- go to the Edit menu, and click Paste. The text of this page
should appear in the practice area.