Copy and Paste

How the Clipboard Makes Copy and Paste Work

Copy and paste feels almost instantaneous: select something, copy it, move somewhere else, and paste. Behind those simple actions is a temporary holding area called the clipboard. Understanding the clipboard explains several everyday puzzles. Why can pasted text keep its formatting in one app but lose it in another? Why does copying a new item often replace the previous one? Why can an image be pasted into some destinations but not others? The answers come from separating the content you copied from the temporary clipboard data that represents it.