Dragging and Dropping Data
All Office applications support standard Windows drag-and-drop actions. Dragging with the left mouse button within a document, worksheet, or presentation moves the item from one place to the other. All Office applications also enable you to drag with the right mouse button; when you do, you see a shortcut menu from which you can choose the correct action. For example, in Word, right-dragging a selected item enables you to choose whether to copy or move it to the new location, or to insert it as a link or hyperlink (see Figure 6.4).
Figure 6.4. All Office applications allow you to drag text or objects with the right mouse button; in Word, use this technique to move text.
Excel allows right drags and provides even more choices than Word: Move Here, Copy Here, Copy Here as Values Only, Copy Here as Formats Only, Link Here, Create Hyperlink Here, Shift Down and Copy, Shift Right and Copy, Shift Down and Move, Shift Right and Move, Cancel.
If you hold down the Ctrl key while dragging, the default action changes. In Excel, for example, use this technique on a worksheet tab to create a copy of the sheet. In PowerPoint's Slide Sorter view (page x), Ctrl+drag copies the slide.
→ To learn more about moving and copying Excel data, see "Moving, Copying, Inserting, and Deleting Worksheets".
Drag and drop is not limited to single documents or even single applications. By arrang- ing document windows on your screen (in Excel, choose Window, Arrange, as shown in Figure 6.5), you can easily drag-and-drop data from one window to the other.
Figure 6.5. Excel gives you multiple choices for arranging document windows.
Word's Arrange Windows function is dreadful—you can only arrange windows one on top of the other, and Word displays toolbars in all the arranged windows, leaving virtually no text visible.
If you'd like to be able to have three or more Word documents open at once and still have room onscreen to work with the documents, see
"Viewing Three or More Word Documents at Once"
in the
"Troubleshooting"
section at the end of this chapter.
It's unfortunate that the Word document windowing capability is botched so badly, because right-dragging between documents in Word is powerful and quick. For example, if you select a phrase in one document, right-drag it to another document, release, and choose Create Hyperlink Here, you'll create a fully functional hot link between the two documents.
PowerPoint has terrific drag-and-drop capability in Slide Sorter view (see Figure 6.6). Drag or Ctrl+drag a slide from one presentation to another and you not only move or copy the slide, it automatically takes on the master style of the target presentation.
Figure 6.6. When you drag and drop in PowerPoint's Slide Sorter view, slides you move between presentations are transformed to the target presentation's style.
To drag and drop between Office applications, arrange the windows on your screen so you can see both, and then drag some Word text into an Excel cell or a PowerPoint slide into Word.
Tip from 
If you have a Word outline that's properly formatted, you can import it directly into PowerPoint and turn it into a presentation. But if your Word document doesn't conform to the official formatting rules, you can still assemble a presentation quickly: Set up a Word window next to a PowerPoint window, and click and drag text from Word to the PowerPoint outline.
When you want to drag between Office applications, but you want to work with each program at full size, use the Windows-standard drag and hover technique. Click and drag the data from the target application and hover your mouse pointer over the target program's icon on the Windows taskbar, but don't release the mouse button. After a moment, the target application appears. Move the pointer to the correct location and release the mouse button to complete the drop.