Excel's Funny Copy-Paste

More than any of the other applications in the Microsoft Office suite, Excel's copy / paste function is on steroids. Let's take a look at the distribution of the function:

• The Standard Paste - All Office apps offer it
• The Link Paste - - All Office apps offer it
• The Image Paste - Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Publisher offer it. Not Access.

But only Excel offers the following:

• The Values Paste 
• The Transpose Paste
• The Formula Paste 

If you're an Excel vet, you know how to use most of these. If, you're a newbie... well, then allow me to explain them.

Pasting Values (V)

In graphic below you have a table of goods and how many were sold in April and May. At the bottom of the April (Column B) you have the total with the SUM formula. When you copy it and attempt to paste it to the May (Column C) you have several options. You can do a standard paste (P) or a Values paste (V). If you choose Values, then you would essentially copy the result of column B, in other words, you would be pasting the value 22 and certainly not the formula to add May's numbers.

Transpose Pasting (T)

In the old days, before Transpose Pasting, we had to manually do this change. Since then, MS has understood the need for this function and let me tell you, we analysts are grateful for it. It has saved us a bunch of manual work.

In the graphic below I took a table of data where the days were arranged in rows. With Transpose paste, the days have become columns. How cool is that?