People working with data often move their data across multiple applications, because they rely on these apps' complementing user experiences to best complete their tasks. Since traditional copy-and-paste approaches do not accommodate diverse table representations adopted by different apps, users spend considerable effort to reconstruct data formats and visual representations, making cross-app workflows costly. For example, when transferring a spreadsheet table with conditional formatting to a markup document, users spend substantial time translating its structure into appropriate tags and manually reformat color. This paper introduces MagicCopy, an AI-powered cross-app copy-and-paste, leveraging source and target contexts and user-specified instructions in natural language to automatically extract, parse, transform, and (re)format data from one app to another. In a study with sixteen participants, users quickly learned and applied MagicCopy to move data across three pairs of tools. Participants further explored diverse applications of MagicCopy to support more streamlined crossed-application interaction in their workflows.
@article{arxiv.2604.04307,
title = {MagicCopy: Bring my data along with me beyond boundaries of apps},
author = {Priyan Vaithilingam and Elena L. Glassman and Nathalie Henry Riche and Gonzalo Ramos and Jeevana Priya Inala and Chenglong Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.04307},
year = {2026}
}