How to Use the Paste Special Command in Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to use the paste special command in Excel. Let's open up Excel by going to our start button. Let's go to all programs, let's go right to Microsoft Office. Let's just open up Excel. Let's type in something that is not normal text. Something like a formula. Just type out some math thing. There's the answer to the formula we just typed in. I'm going to put some formatting on this. Let's make the text color and the background color, you know, some kind of blue. Now, what the paste special command allows you to do is you can choose exactly what features of a cell that you're copying that you want to paste. So, this one has a formula in it and I just want to get, if I was to copy and paste this, I would actually copy and paste the formula, but what I want is the answer, so let's right-click on that, select copy, select where we want it to go and let's hit paste special. Now in this case, it defaults to all, but I just want the value that's the result of the formula. Press okay. As you can see, I only had a value selected so it didn't copy any of the formatting from that cell and if I click on the cell, it only has the answer from the formula, and not the formula itself. If I want to paste just the formatting, I'll just right-click, paste special, and select all. Say okay. Now this time, it copied the formatting as well as the formula instead of the answer. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to use the paste special command in Excel."