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

Anonymous

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

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63 answers

Anonymous

2014-05-11T09:11:58+00:00

For me it was Nokia Suite that was causing the problem.

I put up with this nonsense for years on my PC not knowing what was causing it.

It was only when I recently switched to a Mac running Excel 2010 in Parallels that I noticed, straight after I installed Nokia Suite (in Parallels) the bug came back, bigger than ever, even when Nokia Suite was closed.

Somebody at Experts Exchange suggested I remove Nokia Suite and it worked, so far no problems, I've got a sensible my Excel back!

It really is silly that a prominent program like Excel can get cruelled by a program like Nokia Suite even when it is closed.

Now, of course, I have to find another way to download my Nokia photos and texts on the Mac, short of having two computers. (My Nokia phone is a 4 year old Symbian model that I love).
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Anonymous

2014-05-07T11:47:45+00:00

Yes, I agree with the total waste of time of clicking about the status of the clipboard.

I also found out that closing VNC eliminated the problem. But well, VNC is the source of my data 95% of the time. If I need a dedicated PC, with a dedicated clipboard to run excel, that's quite deceiving.

I am testing the other hint, which tells that saving your sheet eliminates the issue. Seems to work, and to confirm, definitely that it is a bug in excel clipboard management.

LC
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Anonymous

2014-03-31T08:02:06+00:00

I get this if I have VNC running. It stops if I close VNC.
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Anonymous

2014-02-24T00:42:51+00:00

Ever find a fix for ZoneAlarm affecting Excel clipboard?
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Anonymous

2014-02-07T10:30:14+00:00

I faced this issue and found that the logging feature enabled with one of the ftp clients (winscp) have caused the error. I have turned off the logging feature and still faced this issue, once I terminated that program, the issue resolved.
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