“The Clipboard cannot be emptied. Another program might be using the Clipboard” Oct 2012 Office 2010 Excel.

Anonymous
2012-10-15T04:13:46+00:00

“The Clipboard cannot be emptied. Another program might be using the Clipboard” Oct 2012 Office 2010 Excel.

Some of our users get this error when working on xlsx spread sheets, The Clipboard cannot be emptied. Another program might be using the Clipboard.”

This occurs on different spreadsheets on a company SOE. I myself have also experienced it and have disabled various add-ons as per some of what the forums suggest. Various forums suggest various fixes – from what I can gether thus far is there is no silver bullet fix for this as of yet. Microsoft from what little results appear in Bing or Google don’t show much – I was hoping for  someone to advise if this fix had been rolled up in fix or patch…

Can anyone also advise if this error appears for them and what they did to fix it – if fixed at all?

Many thanks in advance.

Ps. Here are some links I have attached.

http://www.treeplan.com/clipboard-cannot-be-emptied-error.htm

http://www.fmsinc.com/MicrosoftAccess/Errors/ExcelPaste/Clipboard.html

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-excel/the-clipboard-cannot-be-emptied-in-excel/4b367423-6c7b-4fc7-9203-23c866255d60?page=4

http://excelribbon.tips.net/T009810_Cant_Empty_the_Clipboard.html

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1wyab60d(VS.90).aspx

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Search/en-US?query=The%20clipboard%20cannot%20be%20emptied%20in%20Excel&ac=8

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-10-25T17:20:19+00:00

    Microsoft,

    Error: “The Clipboard cannot be emptied. Another program might be using the Clipboard”

    Culprit: Excel 2010/2013.

    This is not the fault of Chrome, Bing, OneNote, etc...

    It is not because the document is on the network, local, SkyDrive, USB, being eaten by grimlins.

    It is not whether you drag the cell, copy and paste, make it into Origami animals.

    The problem is Excel.  Sure, one application or another may be using Clipboard but the common denominator is still Excel.  Blame all the applications and forms of usage that bring about this error and still it is Excel.

    So, can we please have a fix for this that fixes Excel and stop blaming everyone/thing else.

    Thank you,

    Deron

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-09-03T16:21:30+00:00

    OneNote did it for me. Not sure why but it seems like it is the Microsoft Products that causes the issues. I even rebooted the system but that did not fix the issue either until I turned off One Note completely off.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-08-21T09:00:23+00:00

    I do not use Skype, Outlook, Firefox or Google Chrome, all of which are some of the apparent culprits with this problem.  In my case the culprit is Zone Alarm Pro (version 11.0.768.000), issued in July 2013.  No problems with Zone Alarm Pro before that.  When I turn it off my Excel problem does not happen.  Turn it back on and the annoying message reappears.  Hope this helps some of you.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-08-08T21:28:10+00:00

    This error was driving me nuts in Excel today and I have never had it happen before.  I do not have Bing desktop or Bing anything, but when I saw your post, I knew you were right.  I have a VNC Viewer application to a remote desktop running, and when I shut that down, the clipboard error went away.  Problem solved!  Thank you, Oasis!

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-07-12T15:20:11+00:00

    The solution that worked for me is disabling MSN messenger addin in Internet Explorer. I am not even sure why it was installed in the first place. I am running Win XP SP3 (I see you shake your head), Office 2010 and IE 8 on my machine.

    One thing is clear. The solution to this problem is not the same for everyone. The most popular "Answer", provided by Community Star Cody C., is to disable the Skype addin. This locked thread comes up on top of the search results, but is inaccurate:

    http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-excel/the-clipboard-cannot-be-emptied-in-excel/4b367423-6c7b-4fc7-9203-23c866255d60

    I am going to adopt the following signature tag line for the coming week -

    --- Contacting the IT support is usually a fruitless endeavor unless you have already found the solution to your own problem.

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