Lesson 2: PowerPaste

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Tutorial > Lesson 2: PowerPaste

PowerPaste is a very powerful function that allows you to paste a series of items, very rapidly.  It is very similar to a semi-automatic firearm, which reloads itself automatically after each round is fired.  Likewise, when PowerPasting a series of items, ClipMate will reload the Clipboard, after each time you paste.

Assuming you have the series of 5 food items from Lesson 1, and Notepad still open, perform the following:

 

Select the "Apple" item.

•Click the PowerPaste button: once and it should display the "up arrow" indicator: .  This lets you know that it will work its way UP the list.  If the arrow points down, then just click again until it flips UP.
•Go to Notepad, and paste an item.  You get Apple
•Paste again, and you should get Banana
•Keep pasting, until you get to Egg.

 

That's PowerPaste!  Note that you started with Apple, which was at the bottom of the list, so you used the Top plug to work your way UP.  If you wanted to PowerPaste in reverse, from Egg to Apple. You would start with Egg, and use the bottom plug to work your way DOWN.

 

Advanced Exercise - Exploding PowerPaste

Under the Edit menu, you will find an option for "explode into fragments".  This menu works as a checkbox - it's either on, or it's off.  Let's try it out.

 

•First, copy this single line:

 John Doe, 123 Main Street, Anytown, NY, 12345, USA, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way

•Now turn on the Exploding PowerPaste option (Edit | Explode Into Fragments) and then turn on PowerPaste.
•Now go to Notepad and paste 9 times with the Ctrl+V key, hitting TAB or ENTER after each paste.

 

You should get each of the "fields" of the sample line, separately.  That is "Exploding PowerPaste".  And it's very powerful indeed. With Exploding PowerPaste turned on, the data pastes as "fragments".  ClipMate parses each clip, and  when it finds a delimiter (by default, commas, periods, semicolons, colons, tabs, linefeeds are used), it breaks the data down into "fragments".

If you have a lot of data to move, and if it's formatted with some predictable delimiter, then this can turn an all-day chore into a simple task.

You can configure the delimiters in the User Preferences dialog box, under "Pasting".

 

For More Information On PowerPaste:

PowerPaste (general help topic)

 

Next Lesson:

Lesson 3: Append

 

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