Copy and paste

In general, you can select any text, data or formulas and make a copy for insertion into another – or the same – document. Ability has commands that enable you to Copy, Paste and Cut data. If you want to copy data to another location without retaining the original source data, then use Cut instead of Copy. Here are the basic steps:

  1. Select the data you wish to copy, using either the mouse or cursor keys. This might be the contents of an individual cell or range in a spreadsheet or database, whether text, data or formulas, or an area of a Write document.

  2. Click on the Copy button image\copy.gif or select Copy from the Edit menu. This command copies to the Clipboard.

  3. Switch to the application that contains the document to which you wish to copy.

  4. Click on the Paste button image\paste.gif or select the Paste command from the Edit menu. This copies from the Clipboard to the target document.

Once the Paste command has been issued, there is no further link between the copied data in the target document and the contents of the clipboard or the source of the data. It is as if you have retyped the data, but much quicker. The contents of the clipboard remain unchanged until you copy some other data to it.

Most of the Ability applications –Write, Database, Spreadsheet – support rows and columns. When you copy data from one application to another, the rows and columns are preserved. This is obvious with Database and Spreadsheet, which are defined in term of fields and cells, but less so with Write, in which a row is represented by a paragraph and a column by a tab stop. For example,

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

12

13

9

7

has four columns (since the months and numbers are each separated by pressing the Tab key) and two rows.

See also:

Examples of copy and paste

Copy and paste in dialogs