Office is a little smarter, if you Copy without selecting anything, it will do nothing and leave the existing clipboard contents intact. Many will copy ‘nothing’ to the Clipboard, removing the previous Clipboard contents. Some programs are smarter than others about Copy when you haven’t selected anything. The standard Clipboard has only one storage location so when you Copy, the new copied stuff replaces whatever is already in the clipboard. However you do it, the copied material is placed in the Windows Clipboard.

The exact way copy works depends on the source program. Or there’ll be a copy command on the menu or right-click menu. CopyĪt the simple level you copy by selecting the item to be copied then press a shortcut – Ctrl + C should work across almost all Windows programs. Sometimes the results aren’t what you need and that’s where the Paste options and trick come in handy. That’s made very easy but there’s a lot of code and smarts going on behind the scenes to convert between different formats and types. You can copy text and images from many programs directly into Office. That simple feature has come a long way since that simple beginning. Like a lot of things in Word, copy then paste seems simple at first, but there’s a lot more going on that you can use to speed up your work.Ĭopy and Paste has a long history in computing, starting with the late Lawrence Tesler (much missed). Demystifying the many paste options in Word and workarounds for troublesome situations. There’s more to Paste in Word than just the keyboard shortcut.

Keep source formatting in word