Copy and Paste issue -- performing actions between copying and pasting.

I'm a fairly inexperienced Excel user but I've got plenty of experience with Word, Powerpoint, and a whole bunch of computer programs in general. However, a new job's forcing me to use Excel 2013, and it requires a lot of copy-pasting, which means I'm encountering a strange quirk very often: Whenever I copy data from a cell or a range of cells, if I don't paste as the next action Excel acts as though I never copied the data in the first place. For example, if I want to copy A2 to B2, I might copy A2, then decide to write a column header on B1, then when I try to paste to B2 Excel has "forgotten" that I copied A2. However, if I copy A2 and then immediately paste into B2 it works fine. But any action between copying and pasting causes excel to lose the copied data.

Now, in literally every other productivity program I can think of, you can perform actions in between copying and pasting without losing data: I can copy a paragraph in Word, then make some edits elsewhere, and paste the copied text later without problems. It seems strange that a program as powerful and mature as Excel couldn't perform an extremely simple task like holding copied data in memory for more than a single action! I realize there's the Office Clipboard menu, but it's cumbersome to have to click to that every time and it breaks the flow of using the keyboard only, which stinks for larger data sets. There's got to be a setting to make Excel copy-pasting behave as it does in every other program...right?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Maybe, but that's not too realistic when I need to copy data from a whole bunch of different spreadsheets to a new one to create a report--I've done a little more research and have seen others complain about this issue on various forums. Is it really possible that Excel doesn't have basic copy-paste functionality?

If you want Excel to save something that you copied, you have to click inside the cell and actually highlight the text with your cursor and then press copy. If you just select the cell, then excel will forget, as you mentioned.

Copy and paste acts like any other software when you highlight the text in excel as opposed to just the cell.

Originally Posted by sajanpatel15

If you want Excel to save something that you copied, you have to click inside the cell and actually highlight the text with your cursor and then press copy. If you just select the cell, then excel will forget, as you mentioned.

The downside to this method is that Excel pastes the content as literal text. It does not relocate relative addresses. For example if the formula in A1 is

=B2

and you select the cell, copy, and paste into C3, the result will be

=D4

but if you select the actual text, copy, and paste to C3, the result will be

=B2

Sometimes you might want that but usually you don't.

Originally Posted by xladept

MS seems to have done it yet again! Have you seen this http://www.dummies.com/how-to/conten...xcel-2013.html

These are all very nice options for how to paste...if there is something on the clipboard to begin with.