Part I: Getting Started with Excel
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New Feature
The Home ➪ Clipboard ➪ Paste control contains a drop-down arrow that, when clicked, gives you additional
paste option icons. The paste preview icons are new to Excel 2010. These icons are explained later in this
chapter (see “Pasting in Special Ways”). The difference is that you can preview how the pasted information
will appear. n
Copying by using shortcut menu commands ............................................................
If you prefer, you can use the following shortcut menu commands for copying and pasting:l (^) Right-click the range and choose Copy (or Cut) from the shortcut menu to copy the
selected cells to the Clipboard.
l (^) Right-click and choose Paste from the shortcut menu that appears to paste the Clipboard
contents to the selected cell or range.
For more control over how the pasted information appears, use one of the paste icons in the short-
cut menu (see Figure 4.8).
Rather than using Paste, you can just activate the destination cell and press Enter. If you use this
technique, Excel removes the copied information from the Clipboard so that it can’t be pasted
again.
Whenever you cut or copy information from a Windows program, Windows stores the information on
the Windows Clipboard, which is an area of your computer’s memory. Each time that you cut or copy
information, Windows replaces the information previously stored on the Clipboard with the new infor-
mation that you cut or copied. The Windows Clipboard can store data in a variety of formats. Because
Windows manages information on the Clipboard, it can be pasted to other Windows applications,
regardless of where it originated.
Office has its own Clipboard (the Office Clipboard), which is available only in Office programs. To
view or hide the Office Clipboard, click the dialog launcher icon in the bottom-right corner of the
Home ➪ Clipboard group.
Whenever you cut or copy information in an Office program, such as Excel or Word, the program
places the information on both the Windows Clipboard and the Office Clipboard. However, the pro-
gram treats information on the Office Clipboard differently than it treats information on the Windows
Clipboard. Instead of replacing information on the Office Clipboard, the program appends the informa-
tion to the Office Clipboard. With multiple items stored on the Clipboard, you can then paste the items
either individually or as a group.
Find out more about this feature in “Using the Office Clipboard to paste,” later in this chapter.
Understanding the Office Clipboard