About Cutting and Copying Cells

When you cut and copy data from views, you cut and copy the cells as text. The following rules are used when cutting, copying, and pasting cells:

You can only cut, copy, and paste data in spreadsheet views.
When you paste cells, the clipboard content is inserted at the selected location in the project. If you select a cell in the spreadsheet to which you want to paste, the selected cell's content is replaced with the copied data from the clipboard. To avoid this, before you paste clipboard content, insert a blank row in the spreadsheet.
When you cut and then paste or copy and then paste cell text containing a task, the task's dependencies and resource assignments are not pasted.
If you cut and then paste or copy and then paste a phase-level task that does not have a WBS level displayed, a new task is created because there was no WBS data in the cell.

The exceptions to the rules are:

If you only select tasks to copy, all of the task's associated resources are copied.
You can paste dependencies.
Open Workbench handles sub-projects and their data components differently under different conditions, and the conditions of pasting these components varies accordingly:
- Referenced project data. When you insert individual WBS items from another project into your project, either by selecting Tools, Subprojects, Insert or by right-clicking and selecting Insert Subproject from the shortcut menu, you paste only references to those items, not their actual data. To copy and then paste data, copy the content from the other project first and then paste it into your project.
- Subproject (mixed) data. When you insert an entire subproject into a project, the subproject's tasks are added as actual data, even though the line representing the project itself is a reference. A more efficient way to copy and paste entire project data is to:
  - Insert the project as a subproject in Open Workbench.
  - Open the project by itself and copy all items in the standard way (to the clipboard), then open the target and paste the items in the standard way. (Use this method for pasting into Open Workbench or a third-party application, such as Microsoft Project.)
  - Import the project from a third-party application, such as Microsoft Project.

More information: