When we left off in our tour of the (text) Editing Tools in SharePoint 2010 yesterday, we had finished looking at the options associated with the Check Out button in the Ribbon, so we’re going to pick it right up today with the next button in line: Paste which, as it turns out, is the first (of two) Clipboard options. Yes, embarrassingly, I just realized that the Editing Tools are broken up into seven distinct groups, and their titles appear beneath the (grouped) buttons as follows: Edit, Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, Layout, and Markup.

As we saw with the Save & Close and Check Out buttons (a.k.a. the Edit group) yesterday, and as we will continue to see with the remaining text editing buttons, there is a drop-down arrow associated with the Paste button. There are two drop-down options in this case: Paste, and Paste plaintext. The Paste option will paste the contents of the clipboard directly into the page, retaining font properties, hyperlinks, etc., whereas the Paste plaintext option will strip all font properties from the copy in your clipboard and insert the text according to the default font style that has been configured for the text block in question.

The second Clipboard option is itself a grouped set consisting of Cut, Copy, and Undo buttons. The purpose of these three buttons is kind of self-explanatory, so I don’t think much needs to be said about them, so I’ll just say that in the case of Cut and Copy, you just select the text you wish to perform the desired action upon, then click the applicable button, and in the case of Undo, well, that one is not only wholly self-explanatory, but it’s quite possibly my single favorite new feature in SharePoint 2010.  Hey, I’m a writer, so of course, I love some Undo button action!

Moving onto the next “bucket” in the Editing Tools, we come to the Font section. This section should be familiar to users of Office products which include the Ribbon, as it’s virtually identical to the Font section in those applications. Here you’ll find all of your available options to apply rich text font properties (select font style, size, color, etc.) to your copy for added visual punch.

Just to the right of the Font section is another set of tools that will be all too familiar to regular users of late-model Office apps: the Paragraph settings. This is where you’ll find all of your favorite settings to dress up your paragraphs, including (but not limited to) bullets, numbering, indent/outdent, and alignment.

We’ll be wrapping up this mini-series-within-a-series look at the Editing Tools for text edits tomorrow with the final three buckets: Styles, Layout, and Markup, so until then, happy editing!

The SharePoint 2010 Web edit story so far:

• Part 1: How to Insert a Picture
• Part 2: Working with Pictures
• Part 3: Working with Text (1 of 3) – Edit Tools
• Part 4: Working with Text (2 of 3) – Clipboard, Font, and Paragraph Tools
• Part 5: Working with Text (3 of 3) – Styles, Layout, & Markup