10 More Mac Copy and Paste Tricks

Here are some more unusual places and situations where you can use Copy and Paste on your Mac.


Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten more Copy and Paste tricks for your Mac.
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So in the last video I showed you ten Copy and Paste tricks. Here are ten more. Let's start first in the Photos App. Let's say you go into a photo like this one. You Edit it and you make some adjustments. I'm going to adjust the colors. I'm going to make some light changes here and let's say I like what I've done. I can click Done here and I'm done with this particular photo. With it selected I can go to Image and I can Copy Edit. Now I can select one, or even several other photos like these. Go to Image and then Paste Edit. It will apply those same changes to all those other photos. It's great when you have a sequence of photos of basically the same thing and you want to apply the same adjustments to all of them.
There's actually something kind of similar in Pages. You can select some text and, of course, you can go to Edit, Copy. But if you look under Format there's also Copy Style. If you Copy Style and then select other text and then go to Format, Paste Style notice the keyboard shortcuts are just Option Command C and Option Command V, then it will apply that style to the text you have selected.
A lot of people don't realize that you can use Copy and Paste in iMovie to copy a whole sequence of different elements from one project to another. So, for instance, I'll go into this iMovie project here and I'm going to select three different things. I've got two different videos. One with some filters and color changes and title. I'm going to do Command C to Copy and then I'm going to exit this project and go into another one. I'm just going to go to Edit and then Paste. Then I've pasted those elements here. It's great if you've created say a title sequence or closing sequence and want to reuse it over and over again in different projects. Also notice you can select a video clip like this and then Copy and then go to another clip like this one here and then go to Edit, Paste Adjustments and paste all the adjustments or just specific ones. So I could add all of them here and you can see how it makes this clip look like this one by using all of the changes I've made to it.
Now when you Copy and Paste a link and send it to somebody they go to the entire webpage. What if you wanted them to see a specific part of that page? Well, you can actually do a web link that will highlight some text on the page. Now to do this I'm going to switch to the Chrome browser. I encourage people to keep other browsers around even though I use Safari as my main browser. I keep Chrome around for various little things and this is one of them. So I'm going to select some text here on the page in Chrome and then I'm going to Control Click, two-finger click on the trackpad or right click on the Mouse, and instead of choosing Copy I'm going to use Copy Link to Highlight. So now if I were to Paste that link, like maybe I would include that in an email message or a text message, notice that it has this special text here at the end that points that exact part of the page. If I look at it you can see how it highlights that. Now the cool thing about these links is even though you can't make these links in Safari you can actually use them. So if somebody clicks on it and they are using Safari as their browser you get the same URL here and when they use it in Safari notice how Safari correctly highlights the text. As a matter of fact it does it better job than Chrome on this end of things.
Hopefully we get the ability to create these links at some point in a future version of Safari as well.
In the Calendar App you can Copy and Paste events. But the cool thing is you can decide what date the new event appears. So I can select this event here and use Command C to Copy. Now if I want it to appear on a specific day all you need to do is click in that day. Notice nothing changes. It doesn't indicate that I've clicked there. But if I do Command V to Paste it will actually put the event there and I can click somewhere else and paste again. It's going to use the same time but it will change the day for that event. So it makes it easy to take, say, a previous event, like a dentist appointment, and Copy it and then Paste it somewhere else without having to start from scratch.
So an interesting thing happens if you go to the Applications Folder on your Mac and then you were to select an application, like let's select Maps here, and then Copy. Now if I were to go into Preview and create a new document from the Clipboard you'll actually get the icon. I get all the different versions of the icon at different resolutions here. If I wanted to use this in another app, like say put it into a Pages document, the way to do that would be to make some sort of selection here in the image. Then do Command A to grab the whole thing, Copy. Now I have an actual image and if I switch to Pages here I can Paste that image in. An easier way to do that would be to use File, Get Info and then select the icon here. Command C to Copy and then go and paste it in directly like that, skipping Preview. That second message works for Folders and Files as well.
Now speaking of Files you can, of course, Copy and Paste files from one folder to another. I showed you how to do that in the last video. But you can also go to Edit Copy and if you hold down the Option Key notice Copy changes to Copy As Pathname. So now you can get the full pathname for any file.
Now if you just Copy the file in many cases like in the case of this image here you can actually then go and Paste the file into a document, like in Pages, and it will actually import the image. Which is another way to do a File Import.
Now when editing text most apps that have text will actually have a second clipboard. This clipboard is part of old Linux systems. The way it works is this. You use Control K, so it is Control not Command, to Kill Text. So it is equivalent to Cut. Then you use Control Y to Yank it back. Now the cool thing about this is it doesn't effect the regular clipboard. So I can Copy the word, this, into the Clipboard like that. Then I can do Control K to kill the that word there. I can then Command V to Paste this and then Control Y to yank back the second word.
If you ever use Spotlight for things like calculations note you can Copy the results. So I'm going to do Command Space for Spotlight. Then I'm going to do a fairly complex formula there and you can see I get an answer. Now, without having to do anything else, I can just simply do Command C to Copy. When I switch to another app and do Command V to Paste it pastes the results. You can actually use this in a few other cases as well. For instance, if I do Weather Denver like that you can see I get the result there. Clicking on that will take me to the Weather App. I can also do Command C and then I can Paste it here and it gives me a link that I can then use to go into the Weather App.
Now one last one I'm going to show you is Universal Clipboard. You can Copy and Paste between your Apple devices. It's important, of course, to follow Apple's instructions including having them each signed into the same Apple ID, having Bluetooth and WiFi turned On, and Handoff options turned On. You can read more about it at this page. Once you have that going you can, say, select some text in one device, so here on an iPhone, and Copy. Then on another device you can do Command V to paste. It will paste the text in it. It should be instantly but note that it only sticks around for a certain period of time. So whatever was in the Clipboard on my Mac before would have returned to the Clipboard after a minute or two if I didn't do anything with Universal Clipboard by pasting it.
So I hope you found these Copy and Paste tricks useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Mac Apps (28 videos)
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