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You can copy stuff in Windows even when there's no Edit menu and no obvious reaction to your mouse clicks.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
Copying from dialog boxes: 2 cool Windows tricks, including one you've never heard about before
Feb. 5, 2006
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard
I was reminded of one of my favorite PC tricks the other day when a reader asked me to help him diagnose a problem. He was getting an unusually complicated error message on the screen and needed to tell Customer Support exactly what the error message said.
"Send them a screen shot," I told the reader.
"They won't take attachments."
That's when my brain shifted gears. I remembered a little known trick I'd learned in the earliest days of Windows. I grabbed my Windows laptop to see if the technique still worked.
It did. And it gave my reader's support folks just what they needed -- the text of a convoluted error message on the screen.
This little trick requires no extra software. The idea is simple.
In Windows, most users know that they can copy words or longer parts of texts by selecting the area they want to copy and choosing "Copy" from the "Edit" menu. The copy goes into a hidden part of Windows called the clipboard. When you want to paste (or insert) the item you copied, you click once in the location you want to insert the text and then choose "Paste" from that same menu.
Easy to do. But what if there is no "Edit" menu?
Many Windows users aren't aware of a hidden feature Microsoft built into the operating system. "Copy" works even when there's no menu entry called "Copy." In other words, if you can select a portion of text, you can copy it and store it in the clipboard. Then you can paste it wherever you want.
This seems like magic, but it's actually a reflection of the power of keyboard shortcuts. Windows assigns the three clipboard operations to the keyboard in addition to making them part of the "Edit" menu. "Copy" is assigned to Ctrl-C, "Paste" is "Ctrl-V" and "Cut" is Ctrl-X. (We're ignoring "Cut" this time around. We'll look at a few tricks with "Cut" later this year.)
So to copy something you've selected, you don't need an "Edit" menu at all. You simply hold down the Ctrl (or Control) key while pressing the C key -- or, to be quick about it, you just roll onto those two keys so that Ctrl gets pressed a nanosecond ahead of C.
What saved my reader's day was an added feature of this little technique. It's one of the coolest parlor tricks you can play on your keyboard.
Error messages usually appear in what Windows calls dialog boxes. Nothing in an error-message dialog box seems to be selectable. Try dragging your mouse over the text while holding the mouse button down -- the standard way of selecting stuff -- and you'll see right away that the text in the dialog is immutable. It's just not reacting at all.
Ah, but it is. All you have to do is click anywhere inside the dialog -- except in the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons -- and press Ctrl-C. Then open a fresh e-mail message window and press Ctrl-V inside the text area to paste the dialog's error message into that window.
Of course, you can also paste into a word processor's text area or into the text-entry area of another dialog box.
This can be useful in dozens of ways. If you've just typed a long address into a Mapquest dialog box, try copying it (highlight and press Ctrl-C -- in most cases, it will show that it's selected) so you can paste the same address into Google Maps later.
You get the point. But what about stuff that refuses to copy no matter what? There's a trick to that, too. I'll tell you about that next week.
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