Few Little Known Paste Commands

When you copy any range, Excel comes up with variety of paste options. Most of these options are what we are already aware of like regular paste, paste only formulas, paste formats and combinations of these options. We also have few other options through paste special command.

There are few paste options we often don’t use or mostly overlook. Let’s see them now.

Paste as Link

If you are using Excel 2007 or later versions, this option links the range you copied by way of formulas in the sheet where you paste. Each cell in copied range will be referred by a formula from the pasted range.

Closest to this option in Excel 2003 is Paste as Hyperlink, but this option will only be activated if you copy content from any other program like Word, PowerPoint etc. This option creates a hyperlink to the file where you copied data from.

Paste as Picture

Whatever you copied will be pasted as a picture without any dependency on copied location anymore. You can use this picture just like any other picture you inserted from other locations.

Paste as Picture Link

This is my favourite option. You will have a picture of the copied data in all respects with one more awesome feature, that is the picture is linked to the source. If you change any value in the source data, this picture is automatically updated to reflect the change. That means Excel essentially creates a snapshot of copied range.

If you are using Excel 2007 or later versions, all the above commands can be found under Home tab > Clipboard group > Under the Paste drop-down.

In Excel 2003, Paste as Picture and Paste as Picture Link are available but hidden from normal eyes. You will have to keep pressing Shift key while clicking Edit menu to see these commands.