Learn keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste text quickly. Highlight text, press Ctrl+C (Command+C for Apple), place cursor where you want to paste and press Ctrl+V (Command+V). To avoid issues with word wrap in emails, turn off the feature or use Notepad to reassemble lines.
One of the most useful functions on computers is learning shortcuts to copy and paste text quickly and easily. Fortunately, you can use hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts to make your job easier, rather than using the more time-consuming method of menu navigation. The shortcuts are basically the same in both Windows® and Apple® operating systems. PC keyboards use the Control (Ctrl) key in combination with other keys, while Apple replaces the Command key.
To get started, place your cursor at the beginning of the text you want to copy, then hold down the left mouse button and drag your cursor across the text to highlight it. You can drag it down to cover more sentences or paragraphs if needed. Release the mouse button when you reach the end of the text you want to copy.
If you need to highlight more text than is visible on a single page, place the cursor at the beginning of the desired text, click once and release, then scroll to the end of the desired text, hold down the Shift key and click the mouse at the end point. All text between the clicked colon will be highlighted automatically.
Once the text you want is highlighted, press the Ctrl key down (Apple users press the Command key), holding it down as you press and release the letter “c”. The text is now copied to the clipboard. If you’d rather use the menu navigation to copy, click Edit in the top toolbar, then Copy.
With the selection now copied to the clipboard, place the cursor where you want to paste the text. Hold down the Ctrl key (Apple users hold down the Command key) and press/release the “v” key to paste text. For menu navigation, select Edit again, then Paste
An alternate method for pasting text that has already been copied to the clipboard is to right-click where you want to paste and choose Paste from the pop-up menu. If “Paste” is grayed out (unavailable), the clipboard is empty. Repeat the previous steps and try again.
One of the more problematic areas of copy and paste is trying to copy a long website address from an email program into a web browser. Word wrap in emails can break a long link into multiple lines . While the first line will appear clickable, it will fail because the rest of the address has been “broken” into subsequent lines. If you try to paste the lines as a block of text in your web browser, line breaks can insert spaces, making it useless.
There are a few ways around this. First, you can try turning off the word wrap feature in your email program so that the address returns to one solid line. With the link intact, it should be clickable, and assuming your email program is connected to a web browser, the link should open automatically. If your email program isn’t connected to a browser, having the address on one line should make copying and pasting easier, using the instructions above. Just copy it from the email, open your web browser and paste the link into the address field (technically called the “URL field” for Uniform Resource Locator).
The word wrap feature is found in different places within different email programs. If you’re not familiar with this setting, check the program’s Help menu to see where this control is located. You will probably want to return the setting to its original state after copying the website link.
Windows users sometimes use a small program called Notepad, first pasting the website address into the program to reassemble the lines before pasting them into a web browser.
You can always copy and paste each line of the website’s address separately into the address field of your browser, taking care to paste each subsequent line at the end of the previous one, eliminating any blank spaces. Be careful about leaving underscores “_” that are sometimes found in website links.
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