Advanced Mouse Tutorial:
Highlight, Cut, Copy, Drag & Paste
 
INSTRUCTIONS:  Following are several exercises to help you get more familiar with the computer mouse.  These exercises will also introduce several techniques that might be new to you: highlighting text, cutting and copying text, dragging text, and pasting text.
 

Use the scroll bar to move this
page up and down. (Click on the
up or down arrows depending on which direction you want to scroll.)
 Phase 1: Highlighting Text

Highlighting text is the most important skill in this tutorial.  If you cannot highlight, you won't be able to perform the other phases of this lesson.  The term Highlighting simply means selecting a specific block of text (a word, group of words, sentence, or paragraph.)  You select this block of text because you want to do something else with it, such as move it, delete it, or copy it.  

To highlight some text, move the mouse pointer to the the first letter of the first word you wish to highlight.  Notice that whenever the mouse cursor is over text, it will look like an I-beam, like this:   Once the cursor is in place, press the left mouse button and keep it held down.  While holding the button, move the mouse cursor to the end of the section of text you wish to highlight.  While you are doing this, note that the text is now white over a blue or sometimes black background, like this illustration.

Different applications highlight with different colors.  Generally, when highlighting something on a web page, as in this tutorial, it will be blue. 

There are many things that you can do with highlighted text other than cut or copy and paste it.  For example, in word processing, you can highlight blocks of text and make them bold or underlined.  Just look at this web page, I highlighted a lot to make this look the way it does!

Now it is time to practice!  Highlight the text in this box:

This is a block of text for you to highlight.  In case you already forgot how, move the mouse pointer over the first letter of this paragraph, press the left mouse button, hold it down, move the mouse pointer to the end of the paragraph, and release the button.  Now, this writing should be white with a blue background.  If it is, you have succeeded!  If it is still the same old black on a white background, just keep trying.

TIP:  You can also highlight text by starting at the
end of the block of text you want to highlight, dragging
the cursor then to the beginning of the section.

To clear the highlight, simply click the left 
mouse button.

 

 

 
 Phase 2: Copying and Pasting Text

Copying a block of text allows you to repeat, exactly, a block of text which has already been typed, be it a single word or several paragraphs.  This is useful if you want to take something from one document and place a copy of it in another document.  This makes it simple to quote from another source - instead of retyping the quote, you can simply copy it and paste it into your own document.  You will find that this technique is very valuable.

The first step is to highlight the text you would like to copy, exactly as we have learned in Phase 1.

The second step is to actually copy the text.  This is somewhat more complicated.  Imagine that the computer has a hidden clipboard stored away somewhere.  When you copy a selection of text, the computer places this on its clipboard, that way, it can store it to be used later on.  There are actually several ways to copy text to the computer's clipboard, but will concentrate on the simplest: the right-click method.  

Right-Click Method

The Right-click Method is simple.  After you have highlighted the text you want to copy, move the mouse cursor anywhere over the highlighted selection of text.  Instead of the cursor looking like the i-beam () the cursor will be an arrow as it passes over the highlighted text, like this:

Once you have the mouse cursor (the arrow) positioned over the highlighted text somewhere, click the right-hand mouse button; a menu should pop up like this: 

Note that only the options available to you are written in black, the others are gray.  You cannot Cut this text because it is not editable text.  You cannot paste because you currently have nothing in your computer's clipboard.

Now, left-click on the menu option which says Copy.  Notice that as you move the cursor over the menu options, the option you are currently over will be highlighted, like this:

You have now placed the highlighted selection of text into the computer's clipboard!

The next step is pasting the copied text into another location.  You can copy and past text from one application into another, but that can be complicated so for this tutorial, we will focus on copying and pasting within the same document.  To paste, we again use the right-hand mouse button.  Simple place the mouse cursor where you want to place the text that you copied (the cursor must look like the i-beam before you can paste).  Click the right-hand mouse button and again, a menu will appear, something like this :

Now, simply select Paste from this menu by left-clicking on it, just as we did with Copy.  Viola!  The text is pasted.

Now lets practice!  Copy the text from the box on the left into the box on the right.  Note that the box on the right is a text field so you can enter text into it and delete text from it.  The box on the left is simply part of this web page and cannot be added to or taken away from, it is not editable, whereas the text field is editable.

The right-click method of copy and paste is one of the simplest but there are other ways.  For example, after you have highlighted the text, left-click on the highlight, hold the button down, and move the cursor into the text filed to the right, and then let go of the mouse button!
 

Important: If you want to practice this more than once, highlight all of the text that you pasted into the box on the right and then press the delete or Del key on the computer keyboard.

Phase 3: Cutting and Pasting Text

If you have mastered the art of highlighting and copying and pasting, Cutting and Pasting is a cinch!  The only difference is that the text you want to cut must be editable text and instead of right-clicking and selecting the option for Copy, you right-click on the highlighted text you want to cut and select Cut from the menu.  Pasting the text is exactly the same.

Let's just jump right to it!  Cut the text from the box on the left and paste into the box on the right.  Note that both of these boxes are text boxes which means that they are editable.

  

To get more practice, now cut the text which you just pasted into the box on the right and paste it back into the box on the left.  You can do this back and forth as much as you like.

TIP:  Once text is copied OR cut into the clipboard, it stays there until you cut or copy something else.  Thus, once you copy or cut a block of text, you can paste it more than one time.  You can only have one block of text in the clipboard at a time though.  Each time you put something new into the clipboard, whatever was already there is erased for good.

That's it! You completed this tutorial.

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