Clipboard |
A
shared, system-wide storage area for temporarily holding and moving
data.
To Open
Edit
Cut (Ctrl-X)Edit
Copy (Ctrl-C)Edit
Paste (Ctrl-V)The Clipboard is an invisible portion of memory, used to temporarily
hold data as it's moved or copied from one
application to another. Although you won't ever
"see" the clipboard,
it's used every time you cut, copy, or paste
something.Using the clipboard is easy. Select a portion of text in your word
processor, an image in your graphics program, or a file in Explorer,
and then select
Cut from the Edit menu; the
selected object(s) will disappear and will be stored in the
clipboard. (Use Copy instead of Cut if you don't
want the original data erased.) Then, move to another location and
select Paste from the Edit menu to place a copy of the object on the
clipboard in that location. You can repeatedly paste the data as many
times as you like.
Notes
- The Clipboard works like the penalty box in hockey; it holds only one
item at a time. If you place new data in the clipboard, its previous
contents are erased. If you never got around to pasting the previous
data, it's lost for good. - You can paste only
data that an application is prepared to receive. For example, you
cannot paste an image into some applications that recognize only text
(such as the Command Prompt or
Notepad). - Even without an Edit menu, you can usually still
access the clipboard using either keyboard shortcuts or the right
mouse button. For example, web browsers have a Copy command in the
Edit menu, but this command is used only for copying portions of the
currently displayed web page to the clipboard. To cut, copy, or paste
text in the Address Bar, just right-click on the text
or use
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V. - You can use the Clipbook Viewer (discussed in
Chapter 4) to view the data currently stored on
the Clipboard or save it into a file or share it across a network. - See Chapter 6 for help with copying and pasting
data with the command prompt window. - The keyboard
shortcuts
(Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V) may not be intuitive at first, but when
you consider that they appear all together on the keyboard and are
located very close to the Ctrl key, the decision to use these keys
becomes clear. As a holdover from earlier versions of Windows,
Shift-Del,
Ctrl-Ins, and Shift-Ins can also be used for Cut, Copy, and Paste,
respectively.