Why paste special

Generally, Excel users will complete any formulas or data entry work and will tidy up their formatting at the end. So if you want consistency in the appearance of your Excel workbook, then only pasting the formatting will be very useful for you. The third of the three most popular Paste options, Paste Formulas is handy if you already have a well-formatted Excel file but you want to copy over or update a formula.

If you have a lot of comments, then this option is for you! By selecting this option in the Paste Special dialog box, you will only copy the comments or notes that are attached to that cell.

If you use drop down lists or any other Data Validation in Excel, use this option to apply the same restrictions to other cells, without applying any data or formatting. A pretty simple explanation:. There are many reasons for copying formula values.

Other times, you just want to make it simpler and faster for users. This is particularly true if your spreadsheet calls external resources or spreadsheets. Productivity Portfolio. In my experience, here are the practical reasons for using Paste Special Values:. Raw data. Today, I still do Paste Special Values for use case 1 to handle the quick and dirty analysis I might need to do in Excel or Google Sheets before copy and pasting the final output — yet again — into a PowerPoint or e-mail.

Based on the explanations for. The output should be simple to understand for an end user. Source: Gifer. This behavior leads to one thing: lack of transparency. Even if the calculations are internal to your organization and never leave the walls of your company, the data and calculations should be transparent for anyone to see so that healthy criticisms and debate can happen about internal processes.

This leads to my second takeaway about an unintended consequence of Paste Special Values: repetitive tasks. As an aside, working at a large publicly-traded company means you have earnings, quarterly reports, and deadlines to hit. In this environment, using Paste Special Values is the fastest way to get the data you need in the format you want as I discuss above. The problem with this approach is that you never step back to look at the overall process because you are tied to the month-end close or a quarterly deadline to pump out a deliverable.

Is there a way to automate or streamline the common tasks? Source: Giphy. If someone has to inherit the spreadsheet or model, you have to provide detailed explanations on how to do the Paste Special into the format you want.

To bring this to a more modern example, imagine you are running a simple website that displays the current weather and temperature. You might get the data from the National Weather Service, but instead of having the data automatically get displayed on your website, you do the following:. Read the data in some backend application where the National Weather Service data is displayed.

Some examples include: Transpose Data: Copy columns to rows or vice versa. Paste Values: Paste the results or values from a formula instead of copying and pasting the formulas themselves.

Paste Formats: Copy formatting from a cell or cell range and paste—or apply it elsewhere. To preview a paste option before you commit to it, click the Paste list arrow and hold the mouse over the paste option. You can paste only the values as displayed in the cells, instead of the formulas that are used to calculate those values. Whenever you paste data, the Paste Options Smart Tag appears next to the selected cell.

You can also paste values by clicking this tag and selecting a paste option from the list.