Excel 2010 Bible

Chapter 4: Working with Cells and Ranges

85

You can clear the contents of the Office Clipboard by clicking the Clear All button.

The following items about the Office Clipboard and its functioning are worth noting:

l (^) Excel pastes the contents of the Windows Clipboard (the last item you copied to the
Office Clipboard) when you paste by choosing Home ➪ Clipboard ➪ Paste, by pressing
Ctrl+V, or by right-clicking and choosing Paste from the shortcut menu.
l The last item that you cut or copied appears on both the Office Clipboard and the
Windows Clipboard.
l Pasting from the Office Clipboard also places that item on the Windows Clipboard. If you
choose Paste All from the Office Clipboard toolbar, you paste all items stored on the
Office Clipboard onto the Windows Clipboard as a single item.
l (^) Clearing the Office Clipboard also clears the Windows Clipboard.
Caution
The Office Clipboard has a serious problem that makes it virtually worthless for Excel users: If you copy a
range that contains formulas, the formulas are not transferred when you paste to a different range. Only the
values are pasted. Furthermore, Excel doesn’t even warn you about this fact. n

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 formulas 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.

The paste options are

l (^) Paste (P): Pastes the cell’s contents, formats, and data validation from the Windows
Clipboard.
l (^) Formulas (F): Pastes formulas, but not formatting.
l Formulas & Number Formatting (O): Pastes formulas and number formatting only.
l (^) Keep Source Formatting (K): Pastes formulas, and all formatting.
l No Borders (B): Pastes everything except borders that appear in the source range.
l (^) Keep Source Column Width (W): Pastes formulas, and also duplicates the column width
of the copied cells.