The clipboard is a system feature of &os2; that allows you to share pieces of information between several applications.

Many applications support the "Copy", "Cut", and "Paste" operations for this purpose, which can normally found in the "Edit" menu of an application. The clipboard can not only hold plain text data, but basically any other data as well, for example, formatted text or graphics. The system can even share the &os2; with &winos2; sessions.

Note that the clipboard can only hold one piece of information at a time. If new information is moved to the clipboard, the old contents are overwritten. Besides, the information in the clipboard is lost when the computer is turned off. You can use the &os2; "Clipboard viewer" to look at the current contents of the clipboard.

For example, if you have a piece of text in a word processor and would like to insert it into another application, do the following:

  1. Select the piece of text in the word processor.

  2. From the "Edit" menu, select "Copy". This copies the text into the &os2; clipboard.

  3. Switch to the other application where the text should be inserted.

  4. Select "Paste" from the "Edit" menu in that application. The text is then copied from the clipboard into the application.
There are standard keyboard combinations that most applications support as well: Note that the &os2; system controls support these keyboard combinations as well. You can thus copy, cut, and paste in all entry fields on the system, for example.