Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Moving Data Between Documents

You can’t paste a picture into your Web browser, and you can’t paste MIDI music information into your word processor. But you can put graphics into your word processor, paste movies into your database, insert text into Photoshop, and combine a surprising variety of seemingly dissimilar kinds of data. And you can transfer text from Web pages, email messages, and word processing documents to other email and word processing files; in fact, that’s one of the most frequently performed tasks in all of computing.

Cut, Copy, and Paste

Most experienced PC users have learned to quickly trigger the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands from the keyboard—without even thinking. Figure 5-4 provides a recap.

Bear in mind that you can cut and copy highlighted material in any of three ways: First, you can use the Cut and Copy commands in the Edit menu; second, you can press Ctrl+X (for Cut) or Ctrl+C (for Copy); and third, you can right-click the highlighted material and choose Cut or Copy from the shortcut menu.

Figure 5-4. Suppose you want to email some text on a Web page to a friend. Left: Start by dragging through it and then choosing Copy from the shortcut menu (or choosing Edit→Copy). Now switch to your email program and paste it into an outgoing message (right).

When you do so, the PC memorizes the highlighted material, socking it away on an invisible storage pad called the ...