From the course: The Best of Word Tips Weekly

Move content quickly without cut and paste

From the course: The Best of Word Tips Weekly

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Move content quickly without cut and paste

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- [Instructor] If you have content in a document that you want to select, maybe it's different parts of a document that you want moved to another area in that document, or even moved to a brand new document, there's a faster way than using cut and paste. We're going to explore spike in this week's Word tip, and we're going to start with this document, Tech Connect080, you can see it's a fairly long document, six pages. Let's say we wanted some of the parts of this document to start a new document. Well in that case, we can start selecting paragraphs, and text, and even images if we wanted to, and then start moving those over to the new document with one simple keyboard shortcut. Ready? Let's go get some content. We'll scroll down to the section on employee spotlight. We'll click in front of the E, and click and drag to the end of the first paragraph only. Now you're gonna use the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl + F3, Ctrl + F3 appears to remove the content, and it does, it puts it in an area called the spike, it's sitting there waiting for us to either paste it, or to go get more content. Let's do that. We'll scroll a little further down, just droning around, we'll click and drag all the way down to the end of the first paragraph. Notice the image gets selected too. Again, Ctrl + F3, we keep doing that, getting the content we want for our new document, or to move elsewhere in this same document. Technology forecasts, we'll just get a little bit of this, select it, Ctrl + F3, looks like it's been cut. The future of AI, let's click and drag to the end of that first paragraph, or maybe get two paragraphs this time. Use Ctrl + F3. Now don't worry about removing content from this document, you can close it without saving it and not lose a thing. Here's where it gets fun, let's switch to another document, you can open up Tech Connect Brief080, or even start a brand new document, a blank page. Now we're ready to go get all of the content we removed from that previous document and put it here. We do that using Ctrl + Shift + F3, that's going to put everything into this document, it's also going to empty the spike. Now if you didn't wanna empty the spike, you could actually just type in the word, spike, then leave a space, and press F3. Go ahead and try that. Notice everything gets popped right into the document, including those images, the formatting, et cetera, and at the same time, we were able to keep everything in the spike, whereas Ctrl + Shift + F3 would've emptied it. Sometimes that's more important, you wanna be able to start over with something else. Now at any time, you can actually go up to the insert tab here in Word, go to quick parts, then go to building blocks organizer, where you will find spike. It's under auto text, and when you select it, you'll see what's in the spike at any given time. And you can see that's everything that we just put into our new document. Click close, and that's how you use spike to quickly grab content from various parts of a document, move it elsewhere in that document, or even to a brand new document like we did.

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