I had someone Hire the Geek recently who was having some issues with a CorelDRAW file. There were a few issues that it was hard to determine the true cause and closing CorelDRAW and restarting made a huge difference. Yet as we started to test some things I discovered one process that I felt needed to be changed.

This process can take place brings data into many different pieces of software. You use the Paste (Ctrl + V) command quite often, don’t you? When we are dealing with plain old text, that works great. Copying and pasting data inside of the same application also tends to work great. It is when the data goes between different software that it can be a good idea to instead use the Paste Special command. Above is an example of the dialog box when using Paste Special to bring a spreadsheet from Microsoft Excel into CorelDRAW and you’ll see four different formats are offered as options. The “best” option may depend on what you want to do with the data once pasted. Bitmap isn’t editable, but would probably look the best. The default is the top option and it allows the most editing options, but likely would look the worst.

In the case of my Hire the Geek session, a bitmap was being pasted in from an e-mail. The quickest option is to Paste Special and choose bitmap. It takes a little longer to instead paste the bitmap into Corel PHOTO-PAINT (or another image editor) and save it. But by doing that, you have a separate file that can be imported into the software of your choice as many times as you would like. Maybe you could save it directly from your e-mail software, but that isn’t always possible in all mail readers.

I encourage you all to investigate the Paste Special command in all your software. It might take an extra step to use, but many times it will save you from the trouble caused by simply using Paste.