Remember Microsoft Office’s “Clippy”? Twenty years ago, the friendly little assistant popped up when you needed help in Microsoft Word and Excel. Much aligned, Microsoft did away with him. But if you paid careful attention, his great little tips and tricks showed you dozens of techniques you wouldn’t discover on your own.
I think Clippy is responsible for all the little Microsoft Word tips and tricks I have in my head now!
Did you know, for example, that Word gives you a Clipboard to store up a list of recently Cut or Copied snippets that you can then paste in any order? “Cut to the Spike” is one variation which sounds intriguing, although the name is more exciting than the feature. Cut to the Spike allows you to cut-cut-cut-cut-cut, then paste all the snippets at once (this technique is in my Word Tips and Tricks book).
But when you’re not working inside Word, your Mac only gives you the one most recent cut or copied item to paste elsewhere. Do you take that inconvenience for granted? Do you copy something…and before you paste it, get distracted and copy something else, then have to go back again?
Or be forced to switch back and forth between two windows…copy/paste, copy/paste, copy/paste?
You no longer have to waste those precious seconds! Imagine copy, copy, copy, copy. Switch documents. Paste the 3rd one, paste the 1st one, paste the 4th one, paste the 2nd one.
If that paragraph makes your geeky heart pitter pat, take a look at CopyPaste Pro by Plum Software. It’s not available in the App Store, and I’m grateful I found it. It keeps a running history of items I cut or copied going back in time. If I worked on a project two days ago and need to pick up where I left off, the text or images I copied are still waiting for me.
CopyPaste Pro’s Archive feature stores links that I permanently assign to keystrokes. My Archive contains the pages on my website I send to my clients all the time. If I want to invite clients to my list of upcoming classes, I type Command-V-1 and the link appears. To send them to my QBO trainings, I type Command-V-6 so that I don’t have to go visit my own web page for the URL.
Additional CopyPaste Pro tools strip the formatting out of text, change capitalization, and harvest emails.
A Clipboard utility on your computer transforms the way you work. When you experience the time saved by searching for text, repeating steps, and switching back and forth between programs; the utility will pay for itself in no time.
