Doing the Drag-and-Drop Thing

Drag-and-drop editing in the worksheet is great as long as you never disable the Alert before Overwriting Cells option - which appears immediately beneath the Allow Cell Drag and Drop option on the Edit tab of the Options dialog box. Otherwise, you can too easily obliterate parts of your spreadsheet by replacing data you don't want disturbed with the data you're moving. At least when the Alert before Overwriting Cells option is enabled, you get a warning that you're about to mess up and replace data that you might need. Of course, if you do mess up and end up replacing entries with the data you're moving or copying (see the warning on copying with drag-and-drop that follows), you can always puts things back to right by using the Undo feature (Ctrl+Z).

When you hold down the Ctrl key to copy (rather than move) the cell selection with dragand- drop, Excel doesn't display the Replace Contents alert box - the one that still gives you the chance to abort the procedure even after you release the mouse button.

Drag-and-drop spreadsheet editing is most effective when you not only need to move or copy a range of cells to a new (blank) place in the worksheet but also want to insert the cells into an existing table of data. To do this kind of insert moving or copying, you must hold down the Shift key as you drag the cell selection to its new position. Excel indicates where the selected data will be inserted at the time you drop it by displaying an I-beam-type indicator in front of the mouse pointer:

• When the I-beam pointer runs horizontally between rows, you know that the selection will be inserted as a new row in the existing table of data.
• When it runs vertically between columns, you know that the selection will be inserted as new column in the table.

Drag-and-drop provides a simple, easy, and, above all, direct way of editing the contents of a worksheet. It does, however, have a big limitation: It's only good when you have direct screen access to both the source range and destination range. This doesn't mean that you have to be able to see both ranges at the same time on the screen (although that's always nice). It does mean that you have to be able to go between the two ranges - either by scrolling to them on the same worksheet or by moving between two windows that you've created on the screen.

For example, you can't use drag-and-drop to move or copy a range of cells from one worksheet to another in the same workbook unless you've taken the time to set up separate windows for the sheets beforehand. And unless you have other reasons for setting up the windows, using drag-and-drop to make the move or copy just wastes valuable time.

In such a case, using the standard cut-and-paste method to make the move or copy is much more efficient. After cutting or copying the cell selection to the Clipboard (Ctrl+X or Ctrl+C, respectively), click the new sheet and select the first cell in the range in which you want the data moved or copied, and then press Enter to complete the procedure. (You can also press Ctrl+V to do this.)