The “clipboard” is a concept familiar to most people who have used modern word processors. It is a piece of your computers memory which is set aside as a temporary storage space. You can “Cut” or “Copy” text from your document into the clipboard. You can then move to another part of the document, and “Paste” this text back into the document at the new position.
The most common use for the clipboard is to move or coppy text which you have already entered into one part of your document to another part of the same document or to another document entirely.
This concept is probably best described with an example.
To do this, we will begin with a test sentence
“The big, red fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
Using the mouse or keyboard, you select the phrase “big, red”.
Now select Edit->Copy from
the menubar, click 
from the toolbar or press Ctrl+C.
This has moved a copy of the selected text to the clipboard.
You now place the mouse cursor between “lazy” and “dog” and click once.
Now select Edit->Paste
from the menubar, click 
from the toolbar or press Ctrl+V
The resulting sentence is:
“The fox jumped over the lazy big, red dog”
The ‘Copy’ command can be invoked 4 ways:
The ‘Copy’ command moves a copy of the selected text to the clipboard. The original sentance is unaffected.
The ‘Cut’ command can be invoked 3 ways:
The ‘Cut’ command moves a copy of the selected text to the clipboard. The selected text is then deleted from the sentance in your document.
The ‘Paste’ command can be invoked 3 ways:
The ‘Paste’ command inserts a copy of all the text in the clipboard at the current position of the cursor. The clipboard is unaffected. (So another paste command will produce yet another copy of the text in the document.)
Note
If no text in the document is currently highlighted, the Paste command inserts the text at the current position of the cursor.
If there is selected text when the Paste command is executed, the selected text is replaced with the contents of the clipboard.
Remember: You are not limited to the bounds of one document. If you Copy (or Cut) text from a document, you can Paste this text into another open document.
