Excel: Paste Special Feature (Part 1)

Paste Special is a feature in Excel which gives you more control of how the content is displayed or functions when pasted. Paste Special is a common feature in productivity software such as Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. It is very commonly used in Word, Excel, Writer, and Calc to provide special formatting or calculations when pasting content into a document. As you already know, Excel's Paste Special dialog can be opened via the Ctrl+Alt+V shortcut combination. After that, you can pick a specific paste option by pressing just one letter key on your keyboard.

Some of Paste Special options are - Paste, pastes all cell contents and formatting. Formulas pastes only the formulas as entered in the formula bar. Formulas & Number Formatting will paste both the formulas as entered in the formula bar and the copied cell’s number formatting. Keep Source Formatting, pastes all cell contents and formatting, including the theme, if one was applied to the source data. All except borders, pastes all cell contents and formatting applied to the copied cell except borders. Keep Source Column Width, pastes the width of the source cell’s column to the destination cell’s column. Transpose, changes columns of copied data to rows, and vice versa. Values, pastes only the values as displayed in the cells. Values & Number Formatting, pastes both the copied cell’s values and number formatting. Values & Source Formatting, pastes cell values and formatting, including the theme, if one was applied to the source data. Formatting, pastes only a cell’s formatting, the same as the Format Painter. Paste Link, links the pasted data to the source data by pasting a formula reference to the source data. Picture, pastes a picture from your Clipboard. Linked Picture, pastes a picture from a website as a link that you can click to view. Skip blanks, prevent replacing the values in the destination range with blank cells that occur in the copied range.