Cutting and pasting resources from the World Wide Web and from Cd-Roms

N.B. This handout focuses on how to copy and paste information from the Internet. Exactly the same principles apply when copying information from CD-Roms (eg encyclopediae). Remember though that copyright restrictions on some CDs may prevent you from doing this.

The internet contains a wealth of material on many subjects and is therefore a natural point of focus for your project research. It is important to use information selectively. Try to avoid handing in work which has information pages printed directly from the web. This will still have a lot of HTML formatting, e.g. headers and footers with date, web address etc on it. It may also have irrelevant add-ons, such as advertising banners and sidebars. All this is guaranteed to give your work a less than professional look!

A much better and more aesthetically pleasing way to go about using information derived from the internet is to copy and paste the specific information you need from the web page directly into a Word document. The instructions below tell you how to do this

  • Make sure Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word are both open
  • In Internet Explorer’s address bar, type in the address of the web site or web page from which you wish to copy information, and wait until it has fully loaded

  • Hold down the left mouse button and drag the pointer over the information you want to copy. This will then be highlighted in blue or black

  • Hold down the CTRL key and press C. The information you have selected is copied to the Windows clipboard, ready for us to use.
  • Bring up your Microsoft Word document. For the purposes of this exercise, we are using a blank document. It may be the case with your project that you will be in the middle of a document. Whatever the case, the principle is the same.
  • Place your cursor at the point where you want the information to be inserted

  • Hold down the CTRL key and press V. This command takes the information you selected on the web page and pastes it into the Word document.

And there you go, you have your web information in your Word document, matching the rest of your work for a professional look. Remember always though to accredit the source.

NB This is a straightforward example where no changes needed to be made. Sometimes, you may find that when you copy and paste information from the web, the formatting is different from the rest of your Word document and/or that the spellchecker finds fault with it. All you need to do is to highlight the information and format/spellcheck it as normal using Word’s own formatting tools, eg font size, bold, italics.