Copying Documents

You may want to "capture" text from screens seen on your web browser and put it in your wordprocessor, or vice versa. Or you may find that composing your e-mail is easier and faster in your wordprocessor. If you know how to copy-and-paste between programs, you can take text from from a website or an e-mail message and put it in your word-processor so that you can quote it or re-work it. Conversely, you can lift your typed words into your e-mail program all at once when you are finished. You can work off-line after you copy to your word processor.

The following are the steps to use with Windows.

Open both programs that you want to work with:

1. In the program you want to copy to (the target, e.g., Word, WordPerfect, NotePad, or WordPad), open a document you want to work with (a blank new one, a temporary one, or a document that you want to add text to).

2. Without closing the first program, open the program that you want to copy from (the source ,e.g., Netscape, Explorer or your email program) by clicking the correct icon for the program.

• You may need to "uncover" the program icon by moving windows or by using the "minimize" button in the upper right corner of any window. The following reveals the desktop where you can click on the correct icon to minimize the window.

Windows 95

Windows 3.x

3. You can switch between programs easily once both programs are running:

Windows: each time you want to switch to the other program, click its icon on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen:

--- Windows95 only

or (for both Windows95 and earlier Windows), you can hold down the left Alt key with your left thumb and while keeping it down, press the Tab key once with your left middle finger. Each time you press the Tab key, a different open program is named in a box on the screen (wait a moment for it to appear). When the program you want is displayed, release the Alt key.

4. In the source program, click the beginning of a sentence, and drag your cursor across the words you want (if you don't have a mouse, consult the program's help menu for keystroke instructions.) If the words fill more than one screen, you can:

• click once at the start of the words
• then without dragging, scroll down to the end of the section you want
• while holding down the Shift key, click at the end of the final word (this will select everything in between)

5. Open the Edit Menu of the source program, select Copy (you can press Ctrl+C without going to the menu)

6. Switch to the target program and make sure your insertion point is located where you want the text to appear. Open the Edit Menu of the target program, select Paste (you can press Ctrl+V without going to the menu)

7. And the text appears, ready for some formatting adjustments that might be needed. The most pesky are paragraph marks that may infest the end of each line. For short passages, you can fix those by hand. For longer passages, see the discussion about deleting line breaks in "Converting Documents," the next topic.