Subtitles of the Movie

In this last introductory module, on Excel, we'll look at some simple cut, copy and paste operations and you have essentially many of the same options that you have with other applications such as PowerPoint and Word, plus a few more. So remember also that it starts with your selection tools including the use of the mouse to either select a single cell and cut its contents with a Command-X type of a Command-or you can of course use the edit menu. And then you select another cell and you do a Command-V to make the paste. Notice what's happening around the active cell. It's like this little ant tracks going around it here as the box is highlighted. So you've cut that and where are we going to put it? We're going to put it there. So when you do the paste operation, it moves from there to there. Now, let's undo again, edit, undo paste or Command-Z. You can also unselect something. Notice that we've undone the paste but this is now selected once again. If you want to unselect something, all you have to do is hit the escape key on the keyboard, which I've just done. Now, remember the Hand tool. And we can drag and drop around items as well. That's essentially a cut and paste operation. What if we want to turn that into pasting an entire row? Select it and drag and drop it. Now we've got again a cut and a paste operation. What if, for example, we wanted to turn this movement into a copy? If you want to turn that into a copy, hold down the Option key. So before you make your click, hold down option. The hand turns into a hand with a plus on it which means I'm going to add something else. So wherever I let go, now I've got a copy and paste operation rather than a cut and paste operation. Does this work between sheets by the way? For example, can I select a whole row and then copy it or cut it and then go to another sheet in an entirely different workbook and make a selection there that becomes essentially my insertion point? What happens now if I go and paste that item? If pastes, just as we would expect it to. So pasting, cut and copying, pasting between open workbooks, is that possible? It's absolutely possible. So we've seen so far the ability to drag and drop to do a copy and paste and a cut and paste operation. We've look at the impact of the Option key. The last thing I want to point out is that you also sometimes have the ability to paste special items as well as we saw earlier when we did this with Word. You can paste pictures, text, just plain text. So without formatting, this will come into play as we sometimes manipulate text around our spreadsheets, but a lot of times we want the value, the text, the picture, a PDF or maybe we just want a link or we insert the contents as a PDF file. So this would just create a link to the source file but it won't actually place the contents themselves. So not only do we have the cut, copy and paste operations that we'll see in other applications, we also can extend that a little bit further in a little bit different way than we can in others when we choose paste, special from the menu. One last thing that's kind of related to that and that is the ability to do a drag and drop operation with the Control key. So if I do the same thing that I did earlier, I took this cell and instead of the Option key, right next to it is the Control key. If I drag and drop here, I'm going to get, when I let go, context menu. So now I can move here, copy here, copy it's values, copy it's formats, links. So this becomes like a paste special and I also get options about what to do with the surrounding cells? Shift down and copy, shift right and copy, shift down and move and so on and so on. So let's see if we press escape or cancel this operation, let's see what happens if I hold down the Control key and go here and let go. Let's shift down and move and look at what happens. What happens is that the text is moved, we're shifting down so we're actually inserting this moved text into a new row. Those are some of your cut, copy and paste operations that will serve you well in modules to come.