QUESTION: Occasionally I want to forward only a portion of an email message. What’s the best way to do that?
Ed: There are several ways to do this. One way is to click Forward in your email program and select the text or pictures that you do not want to forward and then delete these items. Another, and perhaps safer, way is to select the text that you want to forward and Copy it to the clipboard. Then begin another email and paste the copied text into the new message. However, you will have to address the message before sending it. The reason that this is safer is that you won’t include anything accidentally that you wanted to avoid forwarding.
Here’s some information on Copying and Pasting:
Copy/Paste versus Cut/Paste:
Copying and Pasting makes a copy of the selected object or text while Cutting and Pasting moves the selected object or text. If you’re not sure, use Copy rather than Cut.
Here’s an outline of what you can do with these commands:
Copy and Paste
- Copy text from one email to another
- Copy text from the Internet to Word or another email
- Move text around in a Word or other document
- Copy a picture from the Internet and paste it into Photoshop Elements or Word
Methods to Copy
- Click Edit, Copy (if there is a menu)
- Right-click and select Copy or Copy Image if it’s a picture
- Use Control-C on the keyboard
Methods to Paste
- Click Edit, Paste (if there is a menu)
- Right-click and select Paste
- Use Control-V on the keyboard
- After Copying an image from the Internet, in Photoshop Elements, click File, New, Image from clipboard.
After copying text from the Internet, you can avoid the fancy formatting by copying just plain text into a Word document. Use the Word feature Paste Special, Plain Text to do this.
If you find a picture that you like on the Internet you can easily Copy it and Paste it into Word. You can also compose a new message with Gmail and paste the picture into the body of the message. I have tried this with Windows Live Mail also and it works. Once the picture is pasted into a message you can resize it by dragging the corners with your mouse.
Ed Schwartz is a member of the North Orange County Computer Club. To send in a question, go to edwardns.com and click the Contact Me menu. Archives of previous columns are also on the website.