How many times have you highlighted something, then hit the "delete" key, and immediately realized that you’d deleted the wrong thing. It’s sort of like that one-second feeling you get when you know you have just hit your thumb with the hammer, but the pain has not yet kicked in.

Here’s how to never again lose anything that you delete---and always get it back.

To practice this method, first, highlight a few words in a Word document or in an outgoing email message. After you’ve highlighted the word, put your cursor cursor over the darkened part and right-click the mouse. The drop down menu offers noO choice of “Delete.” Instead, it offers “Cut.”

In the old days of pasting-up paper pages and metallic documents before they were set into columns or lead type, when you “cut something out” you actually cut it out and you set it aside. The beauty of this was that you could always grab the piece of paper or lead type later and pop it back in if you wanted.

Then came computers with that deadly delete key, that devil of finality. You’d delete something, and man, it was gone for good. Users hated that, so software programs began including an “un-do” button, which un-does a recent action that you have taken. The same programs also have a re-do button, which can re-do and un-do. (Pay attention, dahlings!)

Using Microsoft Word

If you are typing something in Microsoft Word, you will see on its standard toolbar atop the page two bent arrows. Click the arrow pointing left and you can un-do your most recent action. Keep clicking it to un-do more than one recent action. If you decide later that you didn’t want to un-do something, just click on the re-do arrow and the un-did comes back. (Hmmmm, do Vampire Computers have an “un-dead” button?)

Click on the little down arrow in between the two arrows, and you can see a list of the most recent actions that you can undo; scroll down to see many more. However, use care---when you un-do an action from this menu, you also un-do all actions above it in the list. But then that’s what re-do is for, isn’t it?

Using e-mail

Your email window in Outlook Express and Outlook email programs, both have buttons for un-do, but only Outlook has one for re-do. Outlook has a “cut” button and a delete button, whereas Outlook Express has only a “cut” button.

In both email programs, the “cut” button has an image of a pair of scissors on it. Of course you can always highlight some part of an outgoing email message and use the delete key to delete it forever, but we suggest that you ALWAYS mentally keep “cut” as your default thingy to get rid of stuff.

Why? Well, because “cut” is so incredibly cool and slick that it KEEPS the last thing that you cut, safe and sound right on your clipboard. Can you imagine how handy that is?

The clipboard is a small application in Windows 95+ that temporarily stores information, which has been cut or copied. However, the clipboard can hold only one piece of data for cut, copy or paste at one time. If we send it new data, such as making a second “cut” of something, the preceding “cut” data is deleted. A highly convenient feature of the clipboard is that its content stays with the clipboard even after we paste those contents into another program.

Remember, when you delete something in Windows or in most e-mail programs, it is gone forever. Unless you click on “un-do.” However, when you cut something-----that you immediately realize immediately that you shouldn’t have, no problemo! Just put the cursor back in the same spot, right click, and choose “paste” on the dropdown menu. As you do, bingo! The cut material is put right back where it was.

This applies to pictures and any formatting that went along with what you cut. Don’t you just love this? Imagine the time you will save just in time not spent cursing during the rest of your life.

So, remember this better way to streamline the editing of your email and word processing. Just use un-do, re-do and “cut,” and train yourself to lay off “delete.”

Published: August 9, 2004

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .