10 Mac Copy and Paste Tricks

Here are some unusual places and situations where you can use Copy and Paste.


Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten Copy and Paste tricks for Mac users.
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So you probably use Copy and Paste all day long. But did you know these ten tricks?
First, let's say you've got some Style text in one document or maybe a completely different app. Like I'm in TextEdit here. I Copy this and then I go to another document or app and I were to Paste it. Notice that not only does the text come along, but all of the styling as well. Perhaps that's not what you want. If you just want to Paste the text and keep the styling then go to Edit and look for an option like Paste & Match Style. There's usually a keyboard shortcut that involves Command V. Just use that and then you just get the plain text there using the current style that was at that point in the document.
So when you take a Screenshot there are various keyboard shortcuts that you can use. If you go to System Settings and then down to Keyboard and then click on the Keyboard Shortcuts button and then look for Screenshots notice you have two that involve the Clipboard. Copy Picture of Screen to the Clipboard and Copy Picture of the Selected Area to the Clipboard. If you use this one, Control Shift Command 4, then you can select an area and that goes straight to the Clipboard. If you use it again and again you always have to select the same area. But the universal Keyboard Shortcut, Screenshot and Recording Options, Shift Command 5 allows you to select different options, like capturing a selected window or the selected portion of the screen. If you do you can have it remember the last selection. The advantage to using this is it brings up all of these options. But you can still Copy to the Clipboard. The way to do that is do whatever you do normally, like here I'm going to select an area, but instead of clicking Capture which will then Save to one of these places like the Desktop, you can have it automatically Saved to the Clipboard even if that is not the selection by just using Command C. So that saves that area to the Clipboard and I can do Command Shift 5, move this over, Command C saves it to the Clipboard again. I can do Command Shift 5 and then, say, Window and I can just hover the pointer over this window and do Command C to copy the window. I can do the Screen and then instead of clicking to capture the screen I can just do Command C to capture the Screen.
So for a lot of control use Shift Command 5 and then Command C with whatever one of these options you want to just go straight to the Clipboard.
Now, of course, you can Copy things in an image. But you can also Copy text from an image in the latest versions of macOS. So here I've got an image that is just a photo of a piece of paper but I can easily Copy the text here in the Preview App. Just select and then Command C to Copy. I can also do it in QuickLook as well and the Photos App and other places. By the way if you need to copy a portion of an image in Preview here then switch to the Markup Tools, go to the Selection Tools here, and now you can actually select an area of the image and Copy.
Also in Preview you can Copy and Paste portions of a PDF. So, you might think of Copy and Paste as something you do with text or maybe an area of an image, maybe even a file in the Finder. But you can also do it with PDF's or selections in them. So here I've got a PDF file and if I were to make a selection by clicking and dragging text then I can Copy the text. But if I were to switch to the Markup Tools and then use the selected area there I can select a portion right here and Copy. That's not copying an image of this but the actual piece of the PDF there. Now I can go to File, New From Clipboard and create a PDF of just that section that I selected before. This can really help if you just need a portion of a PDF not the entire thing.
So Quick Time Player is mainly a player although you can do other things like trim video in it as well. But you can also Copy from a video. In this case you would be copying the still image at the current frame. So I paused the video here. If I do Command C to Copy then I can go to another app, like Preview, and you could see New From Clipboard gives me a still image which now I can save as an image document.
You can also do a few special things with Copy and Paste in Numbers. One is that if you select a cell that has a formula result in it, in this case it is the Sum of these two, you can of course Copy it. But if you Paste it it's going to contain that same formula referencing cells relative to that one. However, you can also select Copy and then go somewhere else and then choose Edit and then Paste Formula Results. This will give the cell the value of the cell that you copied, not the formula in it. A handy thing to do with this is to take a whole set of results here and then do a quick Copy and then Paste Formula Results right over it. Now these are the actual numbers here and that's handy if say you wanted to get rid of these, the values will stay the same because they no longer rely on these cells.
I'm often asked how can you get data from a table on the web into Numbers. You can do it with Copy and Paste usually. If the data is well formatted in a table like this you can select a whole bunch of rows, like this. You can do Copy and then switch to Numbers and then Paste and it will paste the actual data into each cell. There maybe some cleanup that you need to do afterwards and some web pages are better formatted than others. But at least it is a starting point.
Now if you create a nice looking chart of some sort in Numbers and you want to use it somewhere else, like say in a presentation in Keynote or a Pages document, you can select it and Copy in Numbers. Then if you go to an app like Keynote you could Paste it into a slide. Keynote and Pages, by the way, will actually keep the data. You can edit chart data and then make changes to it if you want. But if an app doesn't support that kind of thing at the very least you can Paste and get a graphic representation of that table. So if you create a nice looking chart somewhere in Numbers you don't have to leave it in Numbers. You can bring it out and use it somewhere else.
Freeform also gets into the act. You can do lots of different things in Freeform. There are shapes and images and notes and all sorts of things in here. But I could select everything and if I want to Share this with somebody I don't need to worry about exporting or creating a document or anything. I could just Copy it with Command C and then I can go into something else, like this Mail message, and do Command V to Paste. It will paste it here as an image.
Of course another thing you can do with Copy and Paste is use it with Files. So I can go into a Folder here in the Finder, select something like this, and Copy it. Then I could go to another location in the Finder and then I could go to Paste and paste the item there. If I hold the Option Key down Paste changes to Move. So Option Command V will actually move the item whereas just Command V will make a copy of it in this new location. You can do that with Folders. You can do it with multiple files selected and everything.
One last thing I want to show you. When you Copy something if you ever forget what you have in the Clipboard and for some reason you want to know you can go to the Finder, this will only work in the Finder, then you can go to Edit and Show Clipboard. This brings up a window that shows you the contents of the Clipboard. So if I go back here to TextEdit you can see the window goes away because I'm no longer in the Finder. But I could select something else, Copy and now if I switch back to the Finder that window is still there until I close it and you can see the new contents. It even works if you've got an image. So if I select this and Copy I could see what I've got in the Clipboard here or if I select something like this chart here in Numbers I can go back to the Finder and in the Clipboard window I can see that there as well.
So there's some tips for using Copy and Paste on your Mac. Hope some of these were new to you and you find them useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Mac Apps (28 videos)
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