Paste Special Options in Microsoft Excel

Have you ever wanted to paste just one attribute of a cell or range into another cell or range? Suppose you want to save the result of a formula stored in cell A1 in another cell. Or maybe you just want to copy the format (font, alignment, etc.) of one cell to another? Or you need to quickly switch data from columns to rows?

Pasting Only Values, Formulas, Comments, or Cell Formats

1. Select the cell(s) you want to copy and press Ctrl+C or Edit Copy.
2. Click the cell or range you want to paste the information into.
3. Right-click and choose Paste Special.
4. Select Formula to copy only the formula of the cell.
5. Choose Values to copy only the outcome of the formula you copied into the cell and not the formula itself.
6. Choose Format to copy just the format of the cell. (Please also see how to use the Format Painter.)
7. Choose Comments to copy only annotations for the cell.
8. Click OK to accept the option you selected.
9. To cancel the moving border, press Esc, not Enter.

Switching Rows of Cells to Columns or Columns to Rows

This is called transposing your data.

1. Select the cell(s) you want to copy and press Ctrl+C or Edit Copy.
2. Click the cell or range you want to paste the information into.
3. Right-click and choose Paste Special.
4. Select the Transpose check box.
5. Click OK. Then press Esc, not Enter.

These are only some of the functions of the Paste Special options. You can also use it to perform simple operations like arithmetic between the copied data and the data already present in the destination cell.

Tip: In Word, we can copy text and paste it as an image right back into Word. In Excel, we cannot. But you can copy from Excel and paste as an image to Word, and then paste the image back into Excel.