Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon Portland Community College

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.

Step 1: Copy

The first step is to place your material into a “clipboard” on your computer. This material will stay in the clipboard until you copy other material or turn off power to your machine.

  1. 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.
  2. When everything that you want to copy has been selected, place your mouse cursor over the highlighted information and click the right mouse button (Or, hold down the command key and click the left mouse button).
  3. A pop-up menu will appear on your screen.
  4. Click on Copy.

Step 2: Paste

Open up the document into which you want to paste the material you just copied. Note that you can paste into emails, bulletin board messages, word processing packages, etc.Open up the document into which you want to paste the material you just copied. If it’s the same document, skip this step.

  1. Move your mouse cursor to the destination where you want to place the copied material, then click the right mouse button.
  2. A pop-up menu will appear.
  3. Click on Paste.

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