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Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon


How to Cut and Paste

The ability to copy from one document to another and from one place in a document to another is one of the major benefits of word processing. Here's one way to do it.

right click your mouse

Select the text or graphics you want to copy. Do this by holding down your left mouse button while moving the cursor over the items you want to copy on any document or webpage.

screen shot of selecting text

Step 1

right click your mouse

When everything that you want to copy has been selected, place your mouse cursor over the highlighted information and click the right mouse button. A pop-up menu will appear on your screen.

pop-up window with menu: Cut, Copy, Paste

Click on Copy.

Selecting the word copy on menu

This will place the highlighted material in an "electronic" clipboard on your computer. This material will stay in the clipboard until you copy other material or turn off power to your machine.

Step 2

Open up the document into which you want to paste the material you just copied. If it's the same document, skip this step.

new document

Note that you can paste into emails, bulletin board messages, word processing packages, etc.

Step 3

Move your mouse cursor to the destination where you want to place the copied material, then click the right mouse button.

New document with red arrow pointing to cursor.

Step 4

A pop-up menu will appear.

New document with cursor and Cut, Copy and Paste menu.

Step 5

Click on Paste.

Selecting paste from menu.

The items that you copied from the original document will now appear in the new destination and/or on the new document.

Pasted sentence in new document.

Complete!


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