(Don’t forget the Command-A shortcut for Select All!) Once you have something selected, you can copy or cut it. How you select varies with the situation and the data, but it usually involves clicking once, or clicking and dragging over an area.

That might be text ranging from a character to an entire book, an image or a portion of an image, a file in the Finder, a column of data in a spreadsheet, or a chunk of an audio recording. A small window appears, displaying whatever text or image is currently on the clipboard.īefore you can use Copy or Cut, you must first select some data. Although the clipboard is generally invisible to the user, you can view its contents in the Finder - just choose Edit > Show Clipboard. To understand what the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands do, you first must understand the concept of the clipboard, a virtual container that holds whatever data you copy or cut. And many others are missing out on advanced techniques with copy and paste, not to mention related ways of moving data between documents and apps. Surprising as this may be, some people still don’t understand the basics. Sure, there are share buttons now, but would Twitter and Facebook have gotten off the ground if everyone had to link to cat videos by hand?

It would also be far harder to share links to Web pages. If we didn’t have copy and paste, vast amounts of work would have to be done from scratch, rather than starting from previous bits of text, graphics, or entire documents that just need minor modifications. Most of us use the Copy and Paste commands multiple times every day, probably hundreds of times per week, without even realizing it. That may sound odd, but just think how much you rely on it.

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Mac os paste as plain text