Business Glossary

on the Macintosh and in Windows and OS/2, a holding area to which information can be copied in order to transfer it from one application program to another. For instance, the Clipboard can be used to transfer text from a word processor into a drawing program.

The contents of the Clipboard vanish when the computer is turned off. Also, in most software, only one item at a time can be on the Clipboard; the next cut or copy command will replace the old item with a new one.

1. to duplicate information in another place, leaving the original unchanged. In many spreadsheets, editors, and drawing programs, copy means either of two things:
   1. to copy material from one place to another;
   2. to copy material from the document being edited into a holding area, from which you can then "paste" it elsewhere. See cut; paste; Clipboard.
2. a command, under DOS, OS/2, andWindows, that makes a copy of a disk file. For example, the command
   COPY PGM.SRC PGMC2.SRC
   takes the old file (PGM.SRC) and makes a copy of it under the name PGMC2.SRC. Two other examples are as follows:
   COPY A:*.BAS C:
   copies all files on drive A whose names end in .BAS onto drive C;
   COPY A:*.* C:
   copies all files from drive A onto drive C. The asterisk acts as a wild card, matching any filename (see wild card).

to remove material from the document you are editing and place it into a holding area.