Paste and Paste Special...
Although we take cutting, copying, and pasting of Microsoft Office objects
for granted, a lot is going on behind the scenes. In Excel for instance, if you
copy a range of cells, you can paste any of number of different qualities of the
range.
If you copy a range containing formulas, you can paste just the results by
choosing Values from the Paste Special… dialog box below. This is especially
useful if you copy cells containing
complex custom formulas and
you don’t want them to update whenever the spreadsheet is updated.
One very useful option is to paste Column Widths—it was always so annoying to
have to redo all of the column widths after pasting Excel data. With this
option, no data is copied, just column widths. Try it!
If you’ve ever had a problem with numbers being treated like text, try this.
Copy a single cell containing the number 1. Highlight the entire range of
misbehaving numbers and then go to Paste Special… and choose Multiply. Excel
will try to multiply everything by 1 doing nothing to the numbers (except
recognizing them as numbers) and nothing to any stray text. Nice
trick!
If you copy a complex object like an Excel chart, you have several options
for pasting it. The default action (what your computer will do unless instructed
otherwise with the Paste Special… option) is to paste the chart as a complete
Excel chart along with supporting data! When you double-click on the pasted
chart in PowerPoint or Word, you’ll find yourself suddenly working in Excel
again. Keep in mind that this is a copy of the data from Excel,
not the real thing. Changes to the copied chart will not be reflected in
original. For that option, we need Paste Special.
Notice in the graphic below that there are two option buttons. The second
one, Paste Link creates a link between the Excel file containing the chart and
the application displaying the chart. Any changes made in Excel will be made in
the other application.
BEWARE: The original file must
always be available to the
destination file. In other words, don’t mail a presentation off to a client that
requires a link on your network or is in a folder NOT on the client’s computer.
For sending files to others, the best option is to paste a chart as a
Picture. This type of Paste Special does not reveal source data and is not
editable once pasted.