How to Cut, Copy & Paste a Signature

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A common Internet custom in recent years has been the use of special signatures at the end of posts on message boards and email messages. Sometimes these will include famous quotes and sayings, or they can also be simple. It can become somewhat annoying to add these to the end of each and every post, and it's simple to avoid that if you master cut, copy and paste skills. Once you learn this, it will also help you with many other word processing tasks, and you'll find many opportunities to take advantage of it.

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Step 1

Open a text editor. Most operating systems come with some kind of application that will allow for basic word processing operations.

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Step 2

Write all the signatures you use on different posts and different message boards into the text file.

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Step 3

Save the text file on your desktop under a name you can easily recognize. Something like "signatures" would probably be appropriate.

Step 4

Next time you are on a message board, and you need to use a signature, open the text file, and search for the signature you want to use.

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Step 5

Highlight the text with your mouse.

Step 6

Right click on the highlighted text, and select "copy" from the drop-down menu that appears. You will also notice the option to "cut" the text. The difference between copying and pasting is quite simply. Copying simply makes a copy of the data in your computers clipboard. This is an area of your hard-drive devoted to temporary storage for these kinds of situations. Cutting also copies the data to your clipboard, but it also removes the data from the text file. In this situation, copying makes more sense, but there are other situations you might encounter where you would want to remove text from one place and put it in another, and in those cases you would use cutting.

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Step 7

Place your cursor into the area of your post or email where you would want to add the signature. Right click, and select the option "paste" from the drop down menu. This will append the text to the end of your message.

Step 8

Use this same procedure again anytime you need to add a signature. As you accumulate more signatures, make sure and add them to your text file.

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