Q&A: Supersize Cut-and-Paste in Microsoft Word, NYT article.
While the basic cut-and-paste maneuver just grabs one chunk of contiguous text from a file at a time, recent versions of Microsoft Word include a helpful feature called the Spike that may help here. The Spike is sort of a longer-term storage area within Word. By using the Spike, you can select and cut noncontiguous text from around the original document — and then paste it all as one big batch into the new file.
This is great.
Except: note the little word "cut"... the text and images are not copied, they are cut. They disappear from the document. What an odd choice in programming.
That technique is specifically
ReplyDeletemeant to move text and graphic items:
"Spike: A special AutoText entry that stores multiple deletions. Microsoft Word appends one item to another until you paste the contents as a group in a new location in your document."
To copy text and graphic items:
"The Microsoft Office Clipboard allows you to collect text and graphic items from any number of Office documents or other programs and then paste them into any Office document. For example, you can copy some text from a Microsoft Word document, some data from Microsoft Excel, a bulleted list from Microsoft PowerPoint, some text from Microsoft FrontPage or Microsoft Internet Explorer and a datasheet from Microsoft Access, then switch back to Word and arrange any or all of the collected items in your Word document.
Office Clipboard works with the standard Copy and Paste commands. Just copy an item to the Office Clipboard to add it to your collection, then paste it from the Office Clipboard into any Office document at any time. The collected items stay on the Office Clipboard until you exit Office."