Windows XP in a Nutshell, Second Edition

A shared, system-wide storage area for temporarily holding and moving data.

To Open

Edit Cut (Ctrl-X)

Edit Copy (Ctrl-C)

Edit Paste (Ctrl-V)

The Clipboard is an invisible portion of memory, used to temporarily hold data as it's moved or copied from one application to another. Although you won't ever "see" the clipboard, it's used every time you cut, copy, or paste something.

Using the clipboard is easy. Select a portion of text in your word processor, an image in your graphics program, or a file in Explorer, and then select Cut from the Edit menu; the selected object(s) will disappear and will be stored in the clipboard. (Use Copy instead of Cut if you don't want the original data erased.) Then, move to another location and select Paste from the Edit menu to place a copy of the object on the clipboard in that location. You can repeatedly paste the data as many times as you like.

Notes

• The Clipboard works like the penalty box in hockey; it holds only one item at a time. If you place new data in the clipboard, its previous contents are erased. If you never got around to pasting the previous data, it's lost for good.

• You can paste only data that an application is prepared to receive. For example, you cannot paste an image into some applications that recognize only text (such as the Command Prompt or Notepad).

• Even without an Edit menu, you can usually still access the clipboard using either keyboard shortcuts or the right mouse button. For example, web browsers have a Copy command in the Edit menu, but this command is used only for copying portions of the currently displayed web page to the clipboard. To cut, copy, or paste text in the Address Bar, just right-click on the text or use Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V.

• You can use the Clipbook Viewer (discussed in Chapter 4) to view the data currently stored on the Clipboard or save it into a file or share it across a network.

• See Chapter 6 for help with copying and pasting data with the command prompt window.

• The keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V) may not be intuitive at first, but when you consider that they appear all together on the keyboard and are located very close to the Ctrl key, the decision to use these keys becomes clear. As a holdover from earlier versions of Windows, Shift-Del, Ctrl-Ins, and Shift-Ins can also be used for Cut, Copy, and Paste, respectively.