Office 2007 Bible

Copying or Moving Ranges

As you create a worksheet, you may find it necessary to copy or move information from one location to another. Excel makes copying or moving ranges of cells easy. Here are some common things you might do:

• Copy a cell to another cell.

• Copy a cell to a range of cells. The source cell is copied to every cell in the destination range.

• Copy a range to another range. Both ranges must be the same size.

• Move a range of cells to another location.

The primary difference between copying and moving a range is the effect of the operation on the source range. When you copy a range, the source range is unaffected. When you move a range, the contents are removed from the source range.

Note

Copying a cell normally copies the cell’s contents, any formatting that is applied to the original cell (including conditional formatting and data validation), and the cell comment (if it has one). When you copy a cell that contains a formula, the cell references in the copied formulas are changed automatically to be relative to their new destination.

Copying or moving consists of two overall steps (although shortcut methods do exist):

1.	Select the cell or range to copy (the source range) and copy it to the Clipboard. To move the range instead of copying it, cut the range rather than copying it.
2.	Move the cell pointer to the range that will hold the copy (the destination range) and paste the Clipboard contents.

Caution

When you paste information, Excel overwrites any cells that get ...