Darn Paste – Why doesn’t understand what I want to do???

You have some text in a different file, and you want to copy it to your new document, but when you paste it, it screws up.  Either the formatting is wacky, or other things go on.

I was working on my resume this morning, and I had a graphic line at the top by my name.  After listening to a class given by Dirk Spencer, author of Resume Psychology, where he stated that most of the job boards will treat anything in a text box or something similar as a graphic and don’t do it.

Well, I tried selecting the line, I tried copying and pasting the text before and after the line, and everything I pasted, that blasted line would come over into the new document.  Grumble, grumble grumble.

Starting in 2003, Word gave you choices when you pasted text into a document.  You would see a clipboard with a drop down arrow.  If you clicked the arrow you’d see these choices

·         Keep Source Formatting:  Keep it how it looked in the old document, including graphics and spacing around the text

·         Match Destination Formatting:  Use my current styles and choices

·         Keep Text Only:  Get rid of anything that isn’t just the text.

In version 2010, it looks slightly different. 

Now the choices are the three icons, Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting (same as the destination formatting from the previous versions) and Text only.

By choosing text only, I was able to get rid of that blasted line. 

Paste Special

Paste special is really good when you need to put part of an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document.

You could do just a regular paste, but if you need to update the information

Notice how many more options you’ve gained.

Your first two haven’t changed, as they are:

·         Keep Source Formatting

·         Merge formatting

And the table from Excel is converted to a Word table in both cases, and is editable.  Any changes you make to the data in the Word document won’t be sent back to Excel and vice versa.

·         Link and Keep Source Formatting

·         Link and Keep Destination formatting

This option establishes a link between the two files, so if this was a monthly report, you could change the numbers in Excel, and they would show up changed in the Word document.

The picture icon would insert the Excel data in as a picture, so no one would be able to edit the data.

The last one is the text only.  Word inserts the data without the table format, and you can edit the data, and there’s no formatting.

In earlier versions of Paste Special, it would give you text, link or embed the text.  Text and linked you know, but Embed is new.  Embed was really good when you need to put a copy of the Excel file into the Word document.  It was good when you were going to separate the Word and Excel files. 

One word of warning on linked files.  The receiving program need to always know where the source document is (in our case Word is the receiver and Excel is the source).   If you move the source, then you will have to tell the receiver where it went. 

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions.

Lexi

 Now we get into some changes:

Okay, I have a bunch of data, but how do I filter it??

To be able to filter data in Excel, you must have a data table. 

What’s a data table?  A data table is one where the first row is labels and each row below the label row contains data.  Now, not every cell has to contain data, but every row has to contain data.

If you have a blank row in your data table, Excel assumes that it’s the end of your data table.

To filter, choose filter  (autofilter).  When you do, you’ll see triangles to the right of each column’s label.  If they don’t appear, then you may be clicked outside of the data  table.  Click on any cell in the data table and then choose filter (autofilter).

The next step is to click on the triangle on the column you want to filter on.  You can do more than one column.

Depending on the data, Excel may list the different column’s data.    It will give you all the data in the column for you to choose what you want to see.

If the data is a date (3/14/11), then Excel will give you the data by year and then month.  You can drill down and choose a particular set of days if you wish.  Click the pluses in front of the months to drill down.

This example is Excel 2010, but similar choices are in older versions, top/bottom quantity and either percent or items.  There are choices as you can see.

Now that you’ve filtered it, and saved it with the filter; you now come back and open the file and don’t remember what you filtered on.  How do you tell?  If you have an older version of Excel, the triangles will be blue instead of black.  In the newer versions (2007 & 2010) they’ve changed from a blue triangle to a funnel.  It makes it quicker to spot with the funnel than the blue triangle. 

To unfilter the data, click on the triangle (funnel) and choose select all.  It will unfilter all the data in that column.

Changing the subject a little bit, do you when you want to sort data on a certain column, choose the column and then cuss because it just sorted that column, and is no longer attached to the correct rows?  The problem is when you choose a column and tell Excel to sort, that you want it to only sort that column.  What you want to do, is click in a cell in that column and then tell Excel to sort.  It will sort on the column BUT keep the rows together with the data you sorted on.