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Pasting.

© Brian Hughes

There used to be a time when this referred to brushing the sticky stuff onto wallpaper prior to hanging. Yes, I do go back that far... in fact I can remember having to trim the edges of the paper rolls as well.

Isn't new technology a wonderful thing!

Talking of which, isn't it wonderful the way we can move links and bits and pieces of text around our computer screens. By far, the most use we make of the right hand mouse button is to cut or copy something and paste it somewhere else. It always seems to be the little things that make the biggest improvements... this bit of programming really is a gem.

I do a lot of this in writing my articles. Gathering up the links I want to embed here and there, chunks of text when I want to use somebody's own words and transferring it all from my browser into my text editor. The only bottleneck is that the Windows Clipboard will only hold one piece of information at a time. This leads to a lot of switching between screens, a lot of clicking and a lot of muttering about the clipboard limitations.

Fear not... technology has the answer... a better clipboard.

There are a lot of these freebee utilities around and here's a good place to start looking.

ClipBoard

The one I've been using for some time is Yankee Clipper Plus, it gives me everything I need and then some.

It has more than enough capacity to remember all the pieces of information I need and I can save them as well for another session. Also very useful is the boilerplate feature which allows me to format pieces of text exactly how I want to use them. There are other goodies as well such as a nice print option and even a calendar.

This is one of those programs where other files need to be on your computer as well. The author does a very good job of explaining all this and provides links to the files themselves if you need them. A lot of other questions are answered as well, and in case you're interested an upgraded shareware version is also available.

What really caught my eye is the author's own definition of freeware... Make_my_Day_Ware... it certainly makes mine!

FREEWARE- this software is free, and says "Freeware" prominently. That is to keep you out of trouble with your boss. It's not freeware, it's Make_my_day_ware. What in the world is that? Well Make_my_day_ware is software you can do whatever you want with, with one condition: you have to do something for me. I knew it, you're thinking, right? What does this ugly guy with the beard want? I want you to do something for me- for example: you find a really neat website about ancient Egyptian dogs, tell me about in an e-mail and you're "registered" under the concept of Make_my_day_ware. ( I actually could care less about ancient Egyptian dogs, but I would probably get quite a chuckle out of it.)