How-To: Droid Copy & Paste

Posted by Renee in For Beginners, Tips & Tricks on Feb 9th, 2010 | one response

Copying and pasting is easy on the Motorola Droid, but the way you do it is not obvious to new users. Here’s how!

First, you can only copy text from an editable textbox. As far as I can tell, you can’t select random non-editable text unless the app you’re in provides it as an option. For instance, the built-in browser does have a ‘select’ option in “Menu” > “More” which allows you to highlight text from a web page.

For any standard editable textbox, you can copy and paste using the following method:

Press and hold (“long-press”) in the text area.
Choose an option from the menu that pops up, such as “Select All” or “Select Text”.
If you chose “Select Text”, you will be shown the textbox again. Now you can drag to highlight the text you want to select.
Long-press on the highlighted text for a menu with options to Cut or Copy it.
Now, put the cursor in the textbox where you would like to insert the copied text.
Long-press and select “Paste”.

That’s it! A little non-intuitive at first, but easy once you get the hang of it!