The Clipboard

The Clipboard is a special zone of memory in the computer. Its main feature is that can be shared between different programs and can be easily accessed: In many programs, the menu Edit -> Copy option will copy the selected information to the Clipboard and Edit -> Paste will copy from the Clipboard to the active document or program. These operations have keyboard shortcuts:  Ctrl+C  to copy and  Ctrl+V  to paste.

The Clipboard provides an easy way to pass information from one program to another: for example, a part of the text in a document can be selected and put into the Clipboard and then copied from the Clipboard to another program such as a spreadsheet. It’s also useful for copying data from one document to the other in the same program.

To put some piece of data into the Clipboard first select it. When working with text (for example an email message), usually clicking on the text and dragging the mouse will select the text and show it highlighted. Next in the menu of the program choose Edit and Copy (or the keyboard shortcut  Ctrl+C  ). Other programs will have their specific procedure, for example an image processing program may have an option "Select All" that would select the complete image and then the menu option Edit->Copy.

To copy the contents from the Clipboard to a program or document simply open the destination document and in the menu select Edit -> Paste. (Or press  Ctrl+V  )