Download Cutting and pasting resources from the World Wide Web

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 CDRoms (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.