Remember when editors wore green celluloid visors and impaled pieces of paper on a shiny steel spike? Word, too, has a spike, but it's buried so deep that most Word users have never even heard of it. The Spike is a *cumulative* cut and paste. It lets you cut as many blocks of text as you want (like sticking them on a spike) and then paste them all at once in your chosen location. The text is pasted in the order in which it was cut--first in, first out. If you're rearranging massive chunks of text,
you'll find the Spike exceedingly useful.
To use the Spike, do this:
1. Select the text you want to cut to the Spike.
2. Press CTRL+F3.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for each item you want to add to the Spike.
4. Place your cursor at the spot where you want to insert the contents
of the Spike.
5. Press CTRL+SHIFT+F3.
The contents of the Spike will be inserted into your text, and the Spike will be empty once more. (Note: The Spike pastes each of its entries as a separate paragraph, so you probably won't want to unload it in the middle of a sentence somewhere.)
The Spike is actually an AutoText entry, which means you can see what's in it. To do so:
1. Click the Insert menu.
2. Click "AutoText."
3. In the list of AutoText names, click "spike."
You'll see the Spike's contents in the Preview box.
While you're there, you can insert the contents of the Spike into your document by clicking the Insert button. This will leave the contents of the Spike intact so you can use it again elsewhere if you need to. Or, you can accomplish the same thing like this:
1. Type the word "spike" into your document (remember, the Spike is an AutoText entry).
2. Press F3.
What if you want to *copy* rather than cut the text to add to the Spike? You can do it with a special Word macro that we'll discuss next week. In the meantime, I hope you like Spike!
