Copy, cut and Paste Special in Grid by Zaweba
How copying, cutting and Paste Special work in Grid by Zaweba: values only, formats, transpose, skip blanks, paste link, arithmetic and the format painter.
Copy and paste is the first thing anyone learns, but in a spreadsheet there's more to it than in a word processor. A cell carries a value, a formula, formatting, perhaps a note and a validation rule. Grid by Zaweba lets you choose which of those to take, and keeps everything together when you want it all.
Copying inside Grid
When you copy cells within Grid, its own clipboard block carries the lot: formulas, formats, notes and validation. Paste and the cells arrive exactly as they were, with relative references adjusted to the new position. That's how a section of a sheet can be duplicated for a new month and work straight away.
Cut moves, and formulas follow
Cut behaves differently from copy. When you cut and paste, the cells move, and formulas elsewhere that pointed at them follow to the new location. A total at the bottom of the sheet keeps adding up the right cells even after you've moved the block it summarises. Copying doesn't do that, because the originals stay where they were.
Paste Special
Paste Special offers every paste kind. The ones you'll use most are values, which pastes the results of formulas as fixed numbers or text, and formats, which pastes only the look of the cells. Values is the classic way to freeze a calculation, keep a random draw, or turn a helper column of cleaned text into real data before deleting the original.
Arithmetic options let you combine the clipboard with the cells you paste onto: Add, Subtract, Multiply or Divide. Type 1.05 in a spare cell, copy it, select a column of prices and Paste Special with Multiply, and every price goes up by five per cent in place. The same trick with Divide by 1000 turns a column into thousands.
Skip blanks stops empty cells in the copied block from wiping out existing values where they land, which is handy when merging a partial update into a full list. Transpose turns rows into columns and columns into rows, for when a table was set up the wrong way round. Paste link pastes formulas that point back at the source cells, so the pasted block always shows the current values, a simple way to bring figures from a detail sheet onto a summary.
To and from other programs
Grid sends and receives tab-separated text, the format most programs use for tables on the clipboard. Copy a block from Grid into an email or a document and it arrives as rows and columns of text. Copy a table from a web page or another program into Grid and it splits into cells. Check numbers and dates after pasting from elsewhere, because they sometimes arrive as text.
The format painter
The format painter on the Home tab copies formatting without content. Click a cell that looks right, click the format painter, then click or drag over the cells to change. Fonts, fills, borders and number formats all transfer. It's quicker than Paste Special with formats for a quick touch-up.
Avoiding paste mishaps
Pasting over cells replaces what was there, so check the target area first, especially when the clipboard holds a large block. Remember that a pasted formula's relative references shift; if they shouldn't, add dollar signs before copying. If a paste goes wrong, Undo takes it back in one step.
Learning just two or three Paste Special options, values, transpose and multiply, will change how quickly you work in Grid by Zaweba.
