To Copy or to Cut…

They’ve become so ubiquitous that you’re likely using them all the time. But do you know how the copy command really differs from the cut command? Knowing the differences between the copy and cut commands will save you headaches and annoyance, especially if you regularly work in documents and spreadsheets.

First off, to be clear, copy and cut on their own work pretty much the same. It’s when you go to paste after using copy or cut that their distinctions appear.

When you’re working with text or data that is read-only (like this blog post, a news article by the BBC, or a read-only spreadsheet shared to you by a coworker), you only have the option to copy. That’s because you can’t cut anything from a read-only file. And when you use the copy command you’re not just copying the data, you’re copying the formatting of that data - the font, the size, the color, the bullet-point in front of it, and in the case of spreadsheets, the formula. Sometimes this is exactly what you need. Usually it’s annoying. (There’s a whole cohort of folks on the Internet who think that the copy function was designed incorrectly because copying formatting by default is dumb.)

You can drop the formatting when you paste it in its destination, though, by using Ctrl + Shift + V (rather than Ctrl + V for standard paste), or by right-clicking and selecting “Paste as plain text” or “Paste values only” (which can be found under “Paste special” in some programs such as Google Sheets).

And if you inevitably forget to take this extra step and end up with a mismatched, pasted bit of text? Just undo (Ctrl + Z) and re-paste without formatting (Ctrl + Shift + V).

So what about cut? You can use the cut command in any document that you have permissions to edit. If you cut a bit of text from a document, it will appear as though you’ve deleted the text. That’s because, as the name implies, you’ve cut that bit out from where it once was. As with copy, you’re not only cutting the text, but also the formatting. And you can paste that bit into a new location, sans formatting*, with the same keyboard shortcut mentioned above - Ctrl + Shift + V.

*Side note - when you paste something in with no formatting, it’s not truly without formatting, it’s just matching the formatting of the data around it in its destination.

Here’s an important note about the cut/paste command in spreadsheets specifically. When you cut a piece of data from a cell in a spreadsheet, you can think of it like taking scissors and cutting out a hole in your spreadsheet. What this means is that the original cell has completely reverted to its default formatting. So let’s say you have a cell with a number in it which you’ve customized by making it a larger font size, in Comic Sans, and there’s some fancy conditional formatting that turns it green if it’s number 5 or greater. If you cut/paste that data into a new cell, that new cell has all your customizations - the font size, the goofy Comic Sans, and the conditional formatting. BUT the cell that you cut from, where the data used to be, now has none of that - it will revert to the default font size for the spreadsheet, the default font, and no conditional formatting.

Now, you may be thinking, “But if I cut the data from that cell to paste elsewhere, I still want that cell to be in Comic Sans the next time I type in it, I still need it to turn green if it’s a number greater than 5…” If you want to keep the formatting and formula of the original cell while moving the data to a destination cell, copy is the better command to use. You’ll just have to remember to go back to delete the values from the original cell.*

*In case you’re wondering, the delete command does not affect any formatting