Paste Options and Paste Special in Word 2007

Have you ever copied and pasted data from a document that has a variety of different formatting styles and a plethora of bulleted and numbered paragraphs? Or the data you copied is so loaded with images and tables that you had to spent hours altering and reformatting the copied data to match the formatting of the document you are pasting in? There is a way to speed up the pasting of your data without spending any time modifying and adjusting it. Paste Options in Word can save you time and frustration. After you copy/cut a block of text and paste it into your document a Paste Options icon will appear. Ignore it and it will fade away and disappear, but if you wanted to choose specific formatting or wanted the pasted data to match the format of your existing text, Paste Options offers a quick and easy way to do just that.

Here’s how Paste Options works: After you have pasted the block of text, or just a word or two, you will see the Paste Options icon at the end of the pasted item. Scroll over the icon to reveal the drop-down arrow. Click on the drop-down arrow and a menu of options will be displayed for you to choose from:

• Keep Source Formatting allows the formatting of the pasted data to stay as it was in the original document it was copied from.
• Match Destination Formatting matches the text that you have copied to the text of the document you are pasting it in.
• Keep text Only just pastes the text and gets rid of any pictures, objects or any other formatting that existed in the document you copied from.
• Set Default Paste will lead you to Word Options dialog box from where you can customize and set your cut, copy and paste options.

But that’s not all! Not to be outdone by Excel, Word also offers a Paste Special option that gives you more control. When you want to paste the copied data in a specific format do not click on the Paste icon. Instead, click on the drop down arrow underneath the Paste command, in the Clipboard group on the Home tab. This will allow you to access the Paste Special dialog box. Here you can choose the exact format for pasting your copied or cut data. Using Paste Special, you can copy an Excel spreadsheet or an Excel chart and paste it into your Word document exactly as a spreadsheet or a chart. Then double click the pasted Excel table or chart and you can proceed to edit it just as you would in an Excel spreadsheet!

- Rina B.