Written: April 13, 2014

**Readers of this tutorial please be advised that this tutorial has been created for Microsoft Windows PC usage only. This tutorial is not meant for Apple Computer user operations, because copy and paste operations differ from Microsoft Windows copy and paste techniques.**

I have been a pc user since the year of 2000. And still to this very day I come across people that don't know how to copy and paste plain text when using a Microsoft Windows PC.

When I try to explain it to them, it just does not calculate in their mind what they are doing, and why.

So I thought I would share how to copy and paste text from an HTML document. An HTML document is basically a web page. It seems that there are allot of people out there that don't know the difference between a picture of text, and actual true plain text. It boggled my mind way back in the day also.

There are many reasons why someone would want to copy and paste text. Maybe you read a news article and want to save it into a text file on your computer for later reference without going back to the website that you read the article at originally. Or you could be doing research on the web on a subject for a school study project. Once you find the data concerning the subject, you can copy and paste the data into a text document on your computer. Then find more data from other resources on the web and copy and paste that data into the same file. After a while of data collection you will have acquired just what you need in that text file to help you complete your school study project.

In my understanding, there are two kinds of text.
  1. There are pictures that contain an image of text such as .jpeg, .bmp, .gif, and .png files. You cannot just simply copy the text out of them, simply because it is no longer text, it is an image of text.
  2. Then there is plain text which can be copied and pasted directly from a notepad, wordpad, and web page documents also known as web pages, or html files.
Here are two examples, the first text is a .jpg image, and the second is plain text.



And this is actual plain text


In this demonstration I first will show you how to copy and paste text from a common web page. Here I have my Firefox web browser open [left-side] alongside my notepad text editing program [right-side]. One very important reason that it is called "copy and paste" is because this is the order in which the operation is supposed to be performed. I have seen people actually try to paste before they have copied any text. They were using the keyboard shortcut options known as ctrl+c, and ctrl+v. I will explain this keyboard option later in the chapter.

Move your mouse icon to a paragraph that you desire to copy. To select the paragraph, you place the mouse icon at the beginning of the paragraph then click and hold down the left mouse key. While holding down the left mouse key, then move the mouse arrow downward to the end of the paragraph, all the way to the (.) period. Then release the left key of the mouse. This operation is commonly called "click and drag." You will know that the paragraph is correctly selected because you will see that it has been surrounded with a darkened box or highlight color.



Here is what you should see [image-below] once you have correctly used the click and drag selection operation with your mouse. My paragraph that I have selected is highlighted in a blue highlight. Now that I have it selected, I need to perform the copy operation.



To perform the copy operation, make sure your mouse icon is still over the page that contains the paragraph that you are about to copy. On your mouse there is a right clicker button [under your middle finger], and a left clicker button [under your fore finger.] Click the right clicker button [middle finger], and a small menu will appear next to your mouse arrow icon on the screen. Select the copy option on the small menu, by moving your mouse arrow over it and then click the word that reads "copy." Then the menu will disappear. Now the paragraph you had selected is invisibly stored in your computers temporary memory, in a place named the "clipboard."



Now you have properly copied text from a webpage. The next operation to perform is the paste operation. Move your mouse arrow icon over to the document that you wish to paste the text into. In my case it is the notepad program [on the right]. Notepad is a basic text editing program and is in every version of Microsoft Windows. Once your mouse arrow icon is over the notepad page, click the right clicker on your mouse once and that small menu will appear again. When the menu appears, then select the paste option on the menu, and left-click it. You should see the text instantly appear on the notepad page.


Once you have pasted the paragraph notice how the text in the notepad program looks so much different compared to the text on the web page. These two types of texts differ because of the format that they are in. In the web page the text is in a different font, than the font in my notepad. The web page is in a sans-serif font style, and my notepad is in a Consolas font style. Different font styles are meant to give the reader a personal appearance directly from the writer that created the document. The fonts can also be adjusted from a large to a small font.


Remember the paragraph that you have copied is still stored in your computers temporary memory, a place called the "clipboard."This means that you can keep on pasting the paragraph as many times as you wish. But as soon as you copy something else, then the previous copied text in memory is erased and replaced with the newest copy. That is unless you are using Microsoft's Word program, which has options to save a history of copied jobs in memory, which I will not get into in this tutorial. There is also other professional text editing programs out there that I assume have similar options, such as Corel, and Open Office.


Below I have opened a second text editing program called Microsoft Word. And I have pasted the exact same paragraph into the Microsoft Word page, by using the exact same procedures that I taught earlier in this tutorial. Place the mouse arrow icon over the page, right click, and select and click the paste option in the dropdown menu. Notice again how different the text style is when compared to the notepad and web page documents. This is because the Calibri font was the default font style format for my Microsoft Word document. Default font style is just another way of saying, an automatically chosen font style. Meaning the program chose the font style for you, but you can change those preferences also if you wish to do so. But I am not covering that in this tutorial.



Now I have opened a third text editing program that is also installed in all of Microsoft’s Windows Operating Systems, as far as I know. It is the program called WordPad. I have also pasted the exact same paragraph into this WordPad page, using the exact procedures as before. Notice the text style differences.


I mentioned earlier in this tutorial the "keyboard shortcuts" when using the copy and paste operations. Well to make a brief explanation of the procedure. Once you have highlighted or in other words selected the text you wish to copy. Take your hand off of the mouse, and with your left hand press and hold down the ctrl button, then with your right hand quickly press and release the c key on your keyboard. That completes the copy operation. Then to paste, first select the page you wish to paste into, take your hand off the mouse, press and hold the ctrl button with your left hand, then with your right hand press the v key, which will paste the text into the document that you have chosen.

Also I would like to add some more helpful tips to pay attention to when editing text. It will help you allot if you pay close attention to your mouse cursor when you move the cursor over different parts of different documents. For example, when you slowly move your mouse cursor up and down a web page notice how the arrow cursor will change to different cursor images. The different cursors displayed are for you “the user” to be able to discern what type of data that your mouse is currently hovering over.

When the little hand with a pointing forefinger appears [Link Select cursor] this is to let you know that you can click that link that is hidden in the area that you are hovering over with your mouse cursor.

When your mouse cursor is hovering over some plain text the [Text Select cursor] appears. Below is an image of the many types of default mouse cursors that you can become familiar with.


Well this ends my small copy and paste tutorial. I would also like to inform you that this tutorial was created for Microsoft PC users only. This tutorial is not helpful and inacurate to Apple Computer users.

I hope this page was helpful to someone out there on the web.

Thanks for viewing!