Chapter 4: Working with Excel Ranges and Tables
4
■ (^) The last item that you cut or copied appears on both the Office Clipboard and the
Windows Clipboard.
■ (^) Clearing the Office Clipboard also clears the Windows Clipboard.
The Office Clipboard has a serious problem that limits its usefulness for Excel users: if you copy a range that contains
formulas, the formulas are not transferred when you paste from the Clipboard task pane to a different range. Only the
values are pasted. Furthermore, Excel doesn’t even warn you about this fact.
Pasting in special ways
You may not always want to copy everything from the source range to the destination
range. For example, you may want to copy only the formula results rather than the formu-
las themselves. Or you may want to copy the number formats from one range to another
without overwriting any existing data or formulas.
To control what is copied into the destination range, choose Home ➪ Clipboard ➪ Paste and
use the drop-down menu shown in Figure 4.10. When you hover your mouse pointer over an
icon, you’ll see a preview of the pasted information in the destination range. Click the icon
to use the selected paste option.
FIGURE 4.10
Excel offers several pasting options, with preview. Here, the information is copied from E4:G7
and is being pasted beginning at cell F11 using the Transpose option.