Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Moving Text without Affecting the Clipboard.

Moving Text without Affecting the Clipboard

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 25, 2019)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

Here is a trick that was first introduced in Word 5 for DOS and is still valid in the program. Suppose you want to move something (a word, sentence, graphic, table, etc.) from one location in a document to another. You probably know the standard way of doing the move using cut and paste, but there is another way. You can do the move very quickly via the following:

Highlight (select) what you want to move.
Display the spot in the document where you want to move the information.
Holding down the Ctrl key as you right-click the mouse on the spot where the item should be moved. Word moves the highlighted item to where you right-clicked.

The beauty of this technique is that the Clipboard is not involved. This means that if you had something on the Clipboard before the move, it is still there for later use; it hasn't been disturbed.

You should note that if, instead of moving, you want to just copy, all you need to do is hold down both the Shift and Ctrl keys in step 3.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (3896) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Moving Text without Affecting the Clipboard.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is 2 + 2?

2018-01-30 18:10:47

Phil Rabichow

Hi Allen:
Just a correction. After highlighting the text:
1. Ctrl + drag will copy the text
2. Shift + drag will move the text
3. Ctrl+Shift+drag will create an OLE link to the text & bookmark the text.

Oh. I just realized that you said right click. The above works with left click. If you right click, you get a context menu giving you the choice of "move here", "copy here" & "link here"
Phil

2018-01-30 18:08:10

Phil Rabichow

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