by Tony Rushin
Have you ever done a copy/paste and ended up with unwanted formulas or formatting? Paste Special is a way to get around that. If you’ve never used Paste Special, here’s a short video (less than 2 minutes long) that can quickly orient you.
Paste Special is found at the bottom of the drop down window that opens when you click on the Paste tab
Here are the options you have when you open it:
For those of you who use shortcut keys, you can open Paste Special with Ctrl+Alt+V or Alt+E+S.
Many times, when I export information out of a cloud-based application, the numbers come over as text fields: Paste Special can fix this in a jiffy. In other cases, I want to copy the formula – or the value – but don’t want to mess with the formatting: Paste Special saves me from having to reformat after I paste. Those are my two biggest reasons for using Paste Special. For more advanced uses of Paste Special, here’s a great video I found that shows several Paste Special tricks… and the guy has a cool British accent.
