Moving Data Between Documents

6.1. Moving Data Between Documents You cant paste a picture into your Web browser, and you cant paste MIDI music information into your word processor.
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Moving Data Between Documents6.1. Moving Data Between DocumentsYou cant paste a picture into your Web browser, and you cant paste MIDI musicinformation into your word processor. But you can put graphics into your wordprocessor, paste movies into your database, insert text into Graphic Converter, andcombine a surprising variety of seemingly dissimilar kinds of data.6.1.1. Cut, Copy, and PasteThe original copy-and-paste procedure of 1984—putting a graphic into a wordprocessor—has come a long way. Most experienced Mac users have learned to trigger theCut, Copy, and Paste commands from the keyboard, quickly and without even thinking.Heres how the process works: 1. Highlight some material in a document. Drag through some text in a word processor, for example, or highlight graphics, music, movie, database, or spreadsheet information, depending on the program youre using. 2. Use the Edit Cut or Edit Copy command. Or press the keyboard shortcuts -X (for Cut—think of the X as a pair of scissors) or -C (for Copy). The Macintosh memorizes the highlighted material, socking it away on an invisible storage pad called the Clipboard. If you chose Copy, nothing visible happens. If you chose Cut, the highlighted material disappears from the original document. At this point, most Mac fans take it on faith that the Cut or Copy command actually worked. But if youre in doubt, switch to the Finder (by clicking its Dock icon, for example), and then choose Edit Show Clipboard. The Clipboard window appears, showing whatever youre copied. 3. Click to indicate where you want the material to reappear. This may entail switching to a different program, a different document, or simply a different place in the same document. 4. Choose the Edit Paste command ( -V). The copy of the material you had originally highlighted now appears at your insertion point—if youre pasting into a program that can accept that kind of information. (You wont have much luck pasting, say, a movie clip into Quicken.) The most recently cut or copied material remains on your Clipboard even after you paste, making it possible to paste the same blob repeatedly. Such a trick can be useful when, for example, youve designed a business card in your drawing program and want to duplicate it enough times to fill a letter-sized printout. On the other hand. UP TO SPEED Styled Text When you copy text from, for example, Microsoft Word, and then paste it into another program, such as Mail, you may be pleasantly surprised to note that the formatting of that text—bold, italic, font (size, color, and so on)—appears intact in Mail. Youre witnessing one of the Macs most useful but under publicized features: its support for styled text on the Clipboard. Almost all Mac OS X–compatible programs transfer the formatting along with the copied text. Every time you paste formatted text copied from one of these programs, the pasted material appears with the same typographical characteristics it had in the original program. Over time, this tiny timesaver spares us years worth of cumulative reformatting effort—yet another tiny favor the noble Macintosh does mankind. whenever you next copy or cut something, whatever was already on the Clipboard is lost forever.6.1.2. Drag-and-DropAs useful and popular as it is, the Copy/Paste routine doesnt win any awards for speed.After all, it requires four steps. In many cases, you can replace that routine with the farmore direct (and enjoyable) drag-and-drop method. Figure 6-1 illustrates how this works.Note: Most Cocoa programs (Section 5.9) require you to press the mouse button for asplit second before beginning to drag.Virtually every Mac OS X program works with the drag-and-drop technique, includingTextEdit, Stickies, Mail, Sherlock, QuickTime Player, Preview, iMovie, iPhoto, andApple System Profiler, not to mention other popular programs like Microsoftapplications, America Online, and so on.6.1.2.1. When to use drag-and-dropAs shown in Figure 6-1, drag-and-drop is ideal for transferring material betweenwindows or between programs—from a Web page into Photoshop, for example. Itsespecially useful when youve already copied something valuable to your Clipboard,since drag-and-drop doesnt involve (and doesnt erase) the Clipboard. Figure 6-1. To use drag-and-drop, highlight some material. Click in the middle ofthe highlighted area; press the mouse button for about half a second. Now, with thebutton still pressed, drag to another place in the document, into a different window, or into a different application. As your cursor enters the target window, a shadedoutline appears inside the windows boundaries—the Macs way of letting you know that it understands your intention. When you release the mouse, the highlighted material appears instantly in its new location.Its most popular use, however, is rearranging text within a single document. In Word orPages, for example, you can rearrange entire sections, paragraphs, sentences, or evenindividual letters, just by dragging them—a wonderfully efficient editing technique.Tip: When you use drag-and-drop to move text within a document, the Mac moves thehighlighted text, deleting the highlighted material from its original location. If you pressOption as you drag, however, you make a copy of the highlighted text.6.1.2.2. Drag-and-drop to the desktopYou can also use drag-and-drop in the one program you use every single day: the Finderitself. As shown in Figure 6-2, you can drag text, graphics, sounds, and even movie clipsout of your document wi ...