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Oak point clubs: we have plenty of room for your pictures and announcements! See Clubs for more information.

Some of you are going to laugh and say "Who doesn't know how to cut and paste?". Yeah, I know: I assumed everyone knew at least that, but actually a lot of people use their computers for web browsing, email and even basic word processing but have no idea of how to transfer text from one place to another. If that's you, read on.

Most programs have an "Edit" menu which will have choices like "Cut", "Copy", and "Paste". Even Internet Explorer has that menu, though it may be turned off. If you don't see something that looks like this (notice the "File Edit View.." on the left):

pull down the "Tools" menu on the right and choose "Menu Bar" - your browser will then have these extra menu choices.

If you look in Edit right now, everything but "Select All" and "Find on this page" is grayed out and you can't use them. So what's the point?

Use your mouse to position the cursor right at the beginning of this paragraph. Hold your left mouse button down, and move to the right - notice how the text turns blue? That's because you've "selected" it. Now pull down that "Edit" menu again and you'll see that "Copy" has come alive. Choose that and you will have "copied" your selected text.

So now what to do with it? Click in the box below this paragraph and then back in the "Edit" menu. You'll see "Paste" is now alive, and if you choose it, your text will appear in this box.

(If "Paste" didn't come alive, try clicking inside the box again.)

That text could also be pasted somewhere else entirely, like into an email or a word processing document. Even if the program doesn't have an "Edit" menu you can probably still do this: did you notice that the "Edit" menu told you that the shorthand for "Copy" is Control-C and the shorthand for "Paste" is Control-V? You can use those shortcuts instead of the "Edit" menu. Try it here, if you like. Select some text, hit Ctrl-C, click inside the box and hit Ctrl-V. Easy, isn't it? Notice also that if you select text from inside the box, "Cut" comes alive on the menu - try it.

There's one more kind of "Copy" you might like to know about. Just below here is the the note that begins "Send comments and new posts to" and my address is in blue. If you clicked on that, Windows will open up Outlook or Outlook Express and get ready to send me an email. That's fine if you use Outlook or Outlook Express for mail, but nowadays a lot of us don't: we use Gmail, or Yahoo, or AOL, or Comcast Webmail, and since Outlook has never been told how to send mail, you won't get very far. Well, from having read this you already know that you could just select that email address, hit Ctrl-C, and then open up your mail program, hit Ctrl-V in the "Send-To" box, and that would work. But there's another way to copy that or any other "link text" (the stuff in blue). Put your cursor on the text, and right-click your mouse. A menu pops up, and "Copy Shortcut" is one of its choices. Try that with something blue here and paste it into the box. The results are a little different: there's an "http://" in front of web links and a "mailto:" in front of email addresses, because you are copying what the text points to rather than the text itself, but often that's exactly what you want.

I hope this helps a few of you!