[jonhohle]

As others have mentioned, copying and pasting in Excel is bizarre. Highlight the cells to copy; select copy - the source cells now have marching ants around them; perform any action that causes the marching ants to disappear and that content can no longer be pasted. It’s as if those cells are locked as the copy buffer as opposed to some in memory copy like every other copy operation.

[someweirdperson]

It is neither copy nor paste. The copy is "remember this as reference" and paste is "do to this cell to make it relatively similar to the other".

Cut and paste is even better. If the cell to be cut is being referenced, the referencing cell can magically update to the place to paste to.

Selecting and copying the /content/ of a cell is a very normal copy and paste operation.