How to cut, copy and paste in Blogger's post editor

Blogger's post editor doesn't have buttons for cut, copy and paste.   Google Chrome doesn't have them in a top menu bar either.   Fortunately there are still (at least) three ways to move text around.

To my regular readers:You may think I've gone crazy, doing such a "simple" post. But I just answered a question about just this in the Blogger-help-forum.  When I tried googling the question no answers came up in the first page.  And I'm in a mood to write something simple to help newbie-bloggers (we were all new, once). Humour me, I'll be back with a more complex topic soon. Mary

What can you do in the Post Editor

The Post Editor is the tool that you use in Blogger to edit your posts and pages.

It has buttons for many of the things you would do in a word-processor and many other programs, such as:

• un-do/re-do, 
• choose the font, font size and highlighting (bold, italic, underline, strikethru)
• choose the text and background colour
• turn some text into a link
• insert a picture or video
• make the text left, centre or right aligned
• numbered and bullet pointed lists
• indenting a quote
• check the spelling.

It also has a couple of Blogger (or perhaps Google)-specific functions:

• adding a jump-break
• removing all the formatting from a piece of text

But there is one set of very common functions that are missing: Cut, Copy and Paste. Fortunately there are a number of other ways to cut / copy / paste - you just need to know where to find them.



Option 1:  Use the browser menu

To see the  post editor, you must first be using a web-browser (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc) to connect to Blogger.

Most of the these browsers have an edit menu in the top left corner where it "should" be, and this menu has CCP.   So you can

• Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to, and 
• Choose cut, copy or paste from the browser menu.

Exceptions:  Google Chrome and IE9

In some newer browsers, instead of a menu bar, the toolbar has moved to the top right hand corner of the screen, just under the close-window button.   It's shown with a wrench in Chrome and a gear wheel in Internet Explorer, like this.

If you left-click on the wrench, you are shown a menu that has many of the options that are in "normal" browser windows, includng the edit options of cut, copy and paste (in small buttons).

There are also useful  option like to view the source code of the page - these are under the Tools item in the wrench-menu.

(There may be other exceptions too, I'm not familiar with browser software on Apple or Linux computers these days.)

Option 2:  Right-click

• Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to
• Right-click on it using your mouse or keypad button.
• Choose the function you want from the small menu that opens in the middle of the screen (called a context menu).  (The options that are there will depend on your browser software - but even Chrome has cut, copy & paste)

Option 3:  Keyboard shortcuts

• Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to
• Press the keyboard short-cut for the function you want.

Some of the most common keyboard shortcut, and ones that definitely work in Blogger are:

ctrl / x - cut
ctrl / c - copy
ctrl / v - paste

ctrl / a - select all
ctrl / z - unto
ctrl / y - re-do

ctrl / b - bold
ctrl / i - italic
ctrl / u - underline

To do these, hold down the control key (it's sometimes labelled "ctrl") and press the letter-key will you are still holding ctrl.
To me, these are the quickest way to work, even though they take some learning to start with.

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Getting started with Blogger

Blogs, Blogger and bloggers, posts, pages and screens:  some definitions

How to put Posts into your Pages

The difference between Pages and Posts

Putting a picture into your post