Excel 2003 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Moving Cells Around

One of the most common reasons to select groups of cells on a worksheet is to copy or move them from one place to another. (You move cells around, for example, when you change your mind about how to organize your data, or when you find yourself adding so much data to one table that it threatens to take over the rest of the tables on your spreadsheet.) Excel is a champion of the basic cut-and-paste feature and also gives you worthwhile enhancements that allow you to do things like drag and drop blocks of cells and copy multiple selections to the clipboard at the same time.

Before you get started shuffling data from one place to another, here are a few points to keep in mind:

• Excel lets you cut or copy a single cell or a continuous range of cells. When you cut or copy a cell, everything goes with it, including the data or formula, and the current formatting.

• When you paste cells onto your worksheet, you have two basic choices. You can paste the cells into a new, blank area of the worksheet, or you can paste the cells in a place that already contains data. In this second case, Excel overwrites the existing cells with the new pasted data.

• Cutting and copying cells work almost exactly the same way. The only difference you'll see is that when you perform a cut-and-paste operation (as opposed to a copy-and-paste operation), Excel erases the source data once the operation is complete. However, Excel doesn't remove the source cells from the worksheet. Instead, it just leaves ...