You can access those commands by using the Paste Special menu item at the bottom of this figure. There are still some options in Paste Special that are not available in the icons. If you regularly use the Paste icon in the Home tab, the dropdown at the bottom of the tab now leads to a menu with the 15 icons. If you hover over Paste Special in the right-click menu, the menu will disappear and you have access to all 15 icons. When you hover over one of those icons, the rest of the context menu disappears so that you can see the effect of the paste in Live Preview. When you release the mouse, choose Copy Here as Values Only from the menu that appears.Īdditional Details: If you usually paste by using the right-click menu, you will see that the right-click menu includes icons for Paste, Paste Values, Paste Formulas, Transpose, Paste Formats, and Create Links. If you prefer to use the mouse, try this amazing trick: hold down the shift key while you drag the border of a selection. So, if you are a keyboard person, you might find yourself doing the following:įor keyboard-centric people, this is a pretty fast way to convert formulas to values. For example, you could click the first icon in the third row to paste as values.įurthermore, if you hover over that icon, you will learn that pressing V is the shortcut key for pasting values.
When you press Ctrl again, you see a series of icons that let you change the type of paste that you just performed. In Excel 2010, the little Clipboard icon also indicates that you can open the dropdown by pressing the Ctrl key one more time.
Yes, Paste seems simple enough, but there are myriad Paste Special options, and many people were confused about which elements of the copied cells would get pasted.Įven if you are an absolute pro at using Paste Special, you are going to love the new Paste Options menu because it will let you perform tasks that you perform several times an hour with far fewer keystrokes.ĭo a normal copy and paste. Microsoft took a look at data to see which command is the most frequently undone command. Strategy: The new Paste Options menu could be one of the biggest time savers in your hour-to-hour use of Excel. Problem: What's up with the paste command? What do all of those icons mean?