Paste Special

Each user of the Windows operating system should be familiar with the Cut, Copy and Paste commands. In addition to cropping, copying, and pasting content, Excel also offers “advanced paste“ options that are enabled with Paste Special option. With it, we can choose whether we only copy a content, format, content and format, or something else. The many options it offers make it easy to format existing tables.

In order to apply the Paste Special option, first we need to copy the data to Clipboard (if we decide to cut the data, we will only be able to paste the content in a traditional way). When copying, Excel copies all cell elements: content, format, and potential comments. Then we need to specify the destination where we want to paste the copied content, further go to the Home ribbon and click on the Paste option, on the arrow that is located on the bottom of the icon, to open the Paste Special menu. In the menu, we can see more options for pasting content that is divided into three groups: paste (content and format), pasting content (pasting only content) and other options for pasting. The first group first offers traditional pasting, pasting of formulas, pasting of formulas with retaining the number format and pasting with retaining the original format. Then, it is offered to paste the content without frames, pasting with adjusting the column width as for the source cell and gluing with the data transposition (if we selected the data in a row, Excel will paste them into the column). The second group offers us only pasting values, pasting values ​​with the format of the number and values ​​with all the elements of the source cell formatting. Pasting values ​​is often used when we want to convert the result from Excel formula into a numeric value. The third group offers a few more options, which only allow you to paste formats, links, images, or links to the image …

The options we have described are the most common use of the special pasting of Clipboard’s content. At the bottom of this menu, there is also the Paste Special option, which activates the same dialog box that contains all the options that can be applied when pasting. By selecting the polling fields we choose which elements (format, content, comments, etc.) we want to paste, and by confirming the action, we are pasting based on the given criteria.

If we want to copy only the style of a cell, we can also use Format Painter, which is also located in the Home ribbon. This option can be used in two ways. The first way is when we click on the source cell, and then click on Format Painter once. This action allows each new cell we click on to retrieve the original cell formatting elements. The second way is similar to the first one, but click on the Format Painter icon twice. In this case, each next cell we click on will retrieve the source cell format until we stop this operation by clicking on the ESC button on the keyboard.