Weekly Computer Tip # 101
19 February 2005


Saving scraps of documents on the desktop
(Microsoft Windows 7)

Does this ever happen to you? You have some text you want to use over and over again in other documents and you find yourself constantly opening up your word processor and copy and paste the text? Well,

Did you know ...

Microsoft Windows provides a nifty feature called "Document Scrap" which is a file that is created when you drag or copy part of a document to your desktop.

Here's how:

  1. Simply select the text you want to copy.
  2. Drag it to your desktop or right-click your desktop and choose Paste from the shortcut menu. (If you want to drag it to your desktop, make sure that your program such as Word or Excel is not maximized by clicking on the middle button in the upper-right corner.)

A desktop icon is created for the scrap file. To use these document scraps, either double-click them to open, or drag them to where you would like to have them inserted into your document.

Finally, I ought to put on my anorak and inform you that you can use this feature only if the program you are using supports OLE drag-and-drop functions. For example, Notepad does not support OLE but popular programs such as Word, Excel, Paint and Wordpad will support this function.

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