How To Copy Without Mouse

Laptops and personal computers have become essential to our lives. However, being composed of hardware components, they are prone to breakage or malfunctioning. You must have gone through a situation where one of the essential computer components, like the mouse, has stopped working, and you have an essential task to complete. How will you manage to copy and paste things without the aid of a mouse? Your work has become difficult, but you can still pull it off.

If you are a non-tech-savvy person and don’t know how to use these shortcuts, don’t worry, as we’ve got you. Here you will find the solution to your problem, so all you got to do is start scrolling.

Working Without a Mouse

First things first, working without a mouse on your computer is complicated. It is one of your computer’s major and most-used components and is involved in almost every task.

You might be able to perform simple tasks like copying and pasting data or carrying out some clicks. However, the time and effort they will take would increase a thousandfold. With that being said, let’s move toward the solutions.

Method #1: Partial Mouse Usage

You can simply use the Ctrl + C keyboard shortcut to copy something from your screen and paste it anywhere using Ctrl + V. This means you must navigate the cursor using your mouse, so this method isn’t wholly mouse-free. You won’t have to perform any clicks from the mouse.

1. From your computer, pull up the text that you want to be copied.
2. Bring your mouse cursor to the beginning of the desired text and start selecting by holding the right click until you’re at the end.
3. If you want to select the whole text on the page, you can also use the shortcut Ctrl + A to select all.
4. After selecting the text, press Ctrl + C, and the text will be copied.
5. Open the destination page where you want to paste the text.
6. Press Ctrl + V to paste the copied text.

Method #2: No Mouse Usage

You can rely on this method if you’re stuck in an unfortunate situation where your mouse has stopped working entirely. Using keyboard keys for on-screen navigation is the only option that can sometimes become very frustrating. 

1. From your computer, open the text that you want to be copied.
2. Use the Ctrl + A keyboard shortcut to select the text. 
3. After selecting the text, press Ctrl + C, and the text will be copied.
4. To close the app without using your mouse, you must use the shortcut Alt + Fn + F4.
5. Press the Tab key to steer between the apps and select the one where you want to paste your text.
6. Press Enter key to open the app and then use the Ctrl + V shortcut to paste your copied text to its destination.

Text Selection

The Ctrl + A shortcut is a quick way to highlight the whole content of the screen. However, if you only want to select or copy a small portion, you can also do that.

You would have to move the insertion point using your arrow keys to the beginning of your desired part. From there, you would have to press and hold the Shift key along with the arrow keys to highlight the desired area. Use Shift + right arrow to highlight the forward part and Shift + left arrow to select the previous one.

You can also press the Ctrl + Shift with an arrow key to select the text by jumping from word to word instead of selecting letter by letter when pressing just the Shift key. Then you can simply use the famous Ctrl + C shortcut to copy and Ctrl + V to paste.

The Bottom Line

Working on your computer without a mouse can be tedious, especially if you want to copy and paste a portion of a text. This article has described all the methods to copy and paste a piece of text from one place to another in detail.

We hope that after reading this article, you will have been able to complete your work, even if you have a faulty mouse.

Frequently Asked Questions