09 October 2020

Organize Collections in Microsoft Edge with Copy-Paste

As I have mentioned previously on my blog, the Collections feature in Microsoft Edge has become my preferred tool to gather and organize information and prepare my articles. Because I have been using it more frequently, I have started to discover its less known tricks. The following has surprised me and turned out to be very useful: you can move items between collections via simple copy and paste!

You might know already that you can select multiple links with checkboxes and copy them, either with the button at the top of the Collections side panel or through the context menu. What I noticed accidentally is that you can then paste the clipboard to another collection and it instantly adds the contents there – not only links, but manual notes also. It can be very handy if you store a bunch of items in the wrong collection, or simply decide to reorganize them, to merge separate collections or split them up – it would take longer to open the links and re-add them to the new collections, and the process becomes more complicated if you gathered pictures or notes.

There is no mention of this feature in the user interface – when I say ‘paste’ in this case I mean the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + V – so I’m glad I stumbled upon it. This actually works with anything in the clipboard: links copied from other places, text snippets, even images – just like the drag and drop described in the documentation.

One small downside of Collections is how I can get carried away and create too many of them, which makes it cumbersome to use the side panel and the browser context menu. My personal solution is to ‘archive’ collections I no longer use regularly, by copying the contents to a OneNote page and then deleting the collection from Edge. I don’t use the native OneNote integration because it creates a table inside OneNote, and I find it complicated to work like that. Instead, a quick copy and paste results in a neat list of links with titles that I can keep for future reference.

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