About getting images and text

This article is for beginners who don’t already know how to copy and paste files in their hard drive or text and images from PDFs, word documents, emails and websites.

Did you know you can save time when it comes to writing letters, emails, websites and flyers by copying images and text from other electronic documents? If you want to make your own tailored information for customers in Microsoft Word, or other programs, read on for how you can get images and text from documents, websites and emails.

Before we begin, a word on copyright:

In Australia, original works (including images and text) are automatically protected by copyright the moment they are created. Despite this, you will find a great many perfectly legal uses of content from other people’s electronic documents and you can also ask for permission to re-use. For example, perhaps you are working for a large organisation and you need to know how to utilise existing communication materials in your own work. Perhaps you are quoting from someone else’s work (included due recognition and citations) or using images under fair dealing laws (eg. for parody, education or critical commentary). For more on copyright, please see this article.

Learn how to copy and paste

Computers enable us to receive and create a wide variety of information, some of which can be moved from one place to another to save time. For example, you can copy and paste the following things, just as you would photocopy a page in a book and then paste it into a scrap book:

Here’s how to do each of the above:

Copy text from an email or website to another email or to a Word document

Advanced user note:if you want to copy text from an email or Word document to paste into your website or blog, you may need to paste it into Notepad first to clear away the junk code that is generated by email and desktop publishing programs. For more on options to keep formatting, but remove junk, see this article on cleaning Word documents for use in HTML.

Copy text from a PDF to an email or Word document

Advanced user note:the text in your email or word document may not look the same as the PDF because the designer of the PDF probably had access to different fonts than you do on your computer. There is no easy way around this and it is part of the reason for the PDF format being so popular.

Copy an image from a website to an email or to a Word document

There are many ways to do this, but the below is the best way in my opinion.

Advanced user note:it is not always easy to copy an image from somebody else’s email or from a PDF, but if what you intend to do with the image is for screen-viewing purposes only (i.e. not for professional printing), then you can always consider screen capturing the email or PDF then using image editing software to crop the screen grab.  The “Print Screen” button on your keyboard will copy everything on your computer screen to the clipboard, which you can then paste into Word, Photoshop or other programs (not web pages!). To add an image to a web page or email newsletter, you first need to upload it to the web host.

Copy a file from one folder to another on your computer

Advanced user note:if you actually want to move your file(s) rather than making copies of them, you can use the Cut and Paste method. It’s the same as the method above but with the “Cut” option instead of “Copy”. This will delete the original file. It is often safer to Copy and Paste instead, then go back once you’re confident the copied file(s) are fine and delete the original file(s).

 

 

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Please email
Amanda@GreensladeCreations.com
or call 0403 124 533
to discuss your needs.

 

For details of all of Amanda's services, including how she can train your staff to maintain your website, email newsletter, image collection and more, please download this Greenslade Creations brochure.

 

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