Knowing a few simple tasks can expedite technical support. Many people consider Microsoft Word the lowest common denominator while others prefer plain text for everything. Plain text is universally accessible and doesn’t require a large application like Word to view. Plain text is well suited for sharing troubleshooting information from ping and traceroute. It’s quite unnecessary to take a screen capture of ping or traceroute. It’s doubly unnecessary to paste that screen capture into a Microsoft Word document. That text can be copied from the command prompt. Inconveniently, the familiar keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting won’t copy text from the DOS Prompt on Windows.
Microsoft offers instructions:
- Right-click the title bar of the command prompt window, point to Edit, and then click Mark.
- Click the beginning of the text you want to copy.
- Press and hold down the SHIFT key, and then click the end of the text you want to copy (or you can click and drag the cursor to select the text).
- Right-click the title bar, point to Edit, and then click Copy.
Now the text is in the clipboard. You can paste it anywhere, including the body of a ticket. To preserve layout, paste the text in Notepad, then attach the file to the ticket.
