Cut and paste in word?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Sean Hower wonders: <<If I cut a selected area then paste (without copying
first), Word pastes in the area that I cut. This is especially annoying if I
copy a something first then cut something else. How can I turn this off?>>

I'm not aware that you can turn this off, since it's the way the software is
designed to work. (And frankly, the way I feel it should work. Think of
cutting as using a pair of scissors on the text: you don't destroy it, you
just cut it out so you can move it somewhere else.) Whether you cut or copy
text, the material cut goes onto the same clipboard and becomes available
for pasting; the only difference between the two functions is that copying
leaves the original text in place.

If you don't want to reuse the area of text you cut, don't use Control-X or
the Cut command under the menu; simply select it and hit the delete or
backspace key, and it's gone without interfering with subsequent pasting of
text you've already copied. (Think of this as pouring whiteout on the page.
Mnemonic: "Delete" is different from "cutting", and thus serves a different
purpose.)

Depending on which version of Office you're using, you might be able to take
advantage of something called "the spike" (look for it in online help). This
lets you copy or cut multiple texts and add them to the clipboard as if you
were sticking a batch of paper memos onto a metal spike to gather them all
together. Office 2000 also provides a multi-slot clipboard that holds up to
the last 12 selections you cut or copied. I see this often in Outlook 2000,
which displays a floating palette containing icons representing each chunk
of text you've copied or cut; switching to another program leaves the
palette floating over your text so you can click on any icon to paste the
text it represents into the new document or to paste all of the selections.
(I've never seen this behavior in Word 97, so I assume the feature became
available exclusively with Office 2000, and appeared when we installed
Outlook 2000 over top of Outlook 97.)

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 
 


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