Moving and copying workbook content

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Most workbook content can be moved or copied. Excel includes typical cut, copy and paste functionality, and more besides.

If your are not familiar with the terms cut, copy and paste in general, please read the following article from Microsoft before continuing with this page: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/move-or-copy-cells-and-cell-contents-803d65eb-6a3e-4534-8c6f-ff12d1c4139e

[Suggest expanding this page to include a quick reference section for people who are already good at using desktop software in general and can do will with tips and knowing about the existence of useful functionality, followed by a bunch of detailed sections that are useful for newbies and people who want to go deep with modelling in particular]

[ Suggest the quick reference section mentions:

  • Ctrl + x/c/v
  • Cutting, copying and pasting cells and ranges.
  • Absolute and relative references.
  • Shortcut keys and mouse for more general cutting, copying and pasting, and other types of moving/duplicating.
  • Weird behaviour when moving columns of takes with the mouse (i.e. dependent formulae being messed up).
  • Notice default paste includes formats, conditional formatting, data validation etc. Briefly describe paste special (and shortcut keys / mouse for accessing those).
  • Cutting, copying and pasting within the formula bar.
  • Copying and pasting of charts, and chat series.
  • Copying worksheet objects (shapes etc).
  • Copying VBA modules and forms.
  • Copying to other workbooks (don't need to get into detail in quick reference section, but worth mentioning there that it is worth thinking of what happens with workbook content like formatting that depends on strikes and palettes, defined names, cell addresses).
  • When automating (e.g. VBA) tasks like cut, copy and paste, modellers often consider best practice to involve referencing ranges via defined names rather than cell addresses; using things like rng2.Value2 = rng1.Value2 over selecting range 1, copying, selecting rng2, pasting values; and it is often much faster to read/write ranges as arrays rather than looping through each cell ]