Electrical Design Software | Elecdes Design Suite by Scada Systems Ltd

How to use the Advanced Cut, Copy, Paste, and Insert functions

Database editor (and other EDS applications using a data grid) support "Advanced" versions of the Cut, Copy and Paste functionality.

These advanced functions allow for operating on the text inside cells as part of the cut, copy, paste and insert processes. Typically these functions will be used when operating on single column selections. All of these functions utilise the same dialog.

Advanced Cut

Copies a specified substring of text from inside selected cells into the clipboard, then removes the substrings from the cells.

Procedure

  1. Select the column of data you wish to cut from.

  2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+X, or select the Advanced Cut option from the Context Menu or Edit Menu.

    3. Click and drag in the Sample box to indicate the section of text to cut out. Using the sample box spinner, or scrolling the mouse wheel allows you to preview the piece of text that will be cut from other cells in the selection.

    Note that the Selection starts/stops and Length spinners below the Sample box update to reflect the location and size of the text selected.

    You may also change the Selection starts/stops values and spinners manually, and see the change reflected on the text in the Sample box.

  3. Press OK to apply the Cut:

  4. Pasting will reveal the text that was cut out:

Note: You can use the Selection starts/stops drop-down on the dialog to set whether the text selection applies from the beginning or the end of the text. Consider the following example, which will remove the SQ. from each of the selected cells, despite the text before it being variable in length:

Advanced Copy

Copies a specified substring of text from inside selected cells into the clipboard.

Procedure

  1. Select the column of data you wish to copy from.

  2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+C, or select the Advanced Copy option from the Context Menu or Edit Menu.

  3. The rest of the procedure is the same as for Advanced Cut. The only difference is that the selected cells are not modified in the process.

Advanced Paste

Pastes clipboard data inside the text of the selected cells.

Procedure

  1. Select the column of data you wish to paste into.

  2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+V, or select the Advanced Paste option from the Context Menu or Edit Menu.

  3. The dialog works in the same fashion as for Advanced Cut, except the selection in the Sample box indicates where the clipboard data will be pasted inside the cells.

    • To insert the clipboard data at a certain position, simply click the desired position in the Sample box (do not create a selection).

    • To overwrite some of the existing text with the clipboard data, make a selection in the Sample box, selecting the part of text to overwrite.

    • Note: You can use the Selection starts/stops drop-down to change how the position or selection is chosen in each cell (from the beginning or from the end), similar to in Advanced Cut.

  4. Click OK to apply the paste.

    The data in the clipboard for this example is the same data that was cut in the Advanced Cut example, and is overwriting the text LUG in the selected cells.

Repeated Paste

Another feature offered from the Advanced Paste dialog is the ability to repeat the clipboard contents if the destination selection rectangle is larger (has more rows and/or columns) than the data to be pasted from the clipboard.

Regular paste can repeat some single cell, row or column selections but it will always overwrite the current contents and cannot repeat across the same dimension as the clipboard contents. If your destination selection rectangle extends in the same direction of rows and/or columns as the clipboard contents then regular paste will paste the cells once only, at the top-left of the destination selection rectangle. To repeat the contents of the clipboard down and/or across the destination selection you must use Advanced Paste.

  1. Copy the values to be pasted.

  2. Select the cells you want to paste into.

  3. Press CTRL+SHIFT+V, or select the Advanced Paste option from the Context Menu or Edit Menu.

  4. Tick the box Repeat down/across section and make any necessary choice about where the data should be pasted inside any existing text in the cells.

    The example above is to paste the data at the end of the existing text in the cells.

  5. Click OK to apply the paste.

Advanced Insert

Advanced Insert works in the same way as Advanced Paste, but does not require the clipboard to contain data to paste. Instead, you are prompted for a piece of text to insert.

Procedure

  1. Select the column of data you wish to insert into.

  2. Select the Advanced Insert option from the Context Menu or Edit Menu.

  3. Enter the text you wish to insert into all the selected cells, then click Next.

  4. Use the following dialog in the same way as for Advanced Paste.

  5. Click OK to apply the insertion.


Note: The first insertion dialog can be used to specify an incrementing piece of text (either letters or numbers):

Variable Length

You can also cut/copy/paste/insert a substring of variable length. Below is an example of how to cut a substring of variable length.

Procedure

  1. Select the column of data you wish to cut from.

  2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+X, or select the Advanced Cut option from the Context Menu or Edit Menu.

  3. To select a substring of variable length, set the Selection starts drop down to "from beginning" and the Selection stops drop down to "from end".

  4. Click and drag in the Sample box to indicate the section of text to cut out OR manually set the Selection starts/stops values.

  5. Press OK to apply the Cut:

  6. Pasting will reveal the text that was cut out:

See Also

How to Cut, Copy, Paste and Clear data