“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

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

63 answers

Sort by: Newest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2013-07-08T00:22:28+00:00

    For the record, I have this problem sporadically when dragging and dropping with an Excel 2010 spreadsheet with no other apps open and no TSRs for any of the aforementioned apps (Skype, Nokia Suite, ZoneAlarm or anything else of significance) running. It looks like everyone is getting some relief by shutting down their other apps, but this appears to be a Microsoft Excel bug, pure and simple.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2013-06-16T01:56:52+00:00

    Thank you - I was losing my mind - Nokia suite for me also.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2013-04-22T14:42:14+00:00

    Hi Stephen, glad I was able to help someone else. Did you uninstall zonealarm, or were you and to find a settings change that helped? I switched firewalls when I couldn't resolve the issue but wouldn't mind going back to zonealarm.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2013-04-21T21:16:28+00:00

    Many thanks BorisGr, I put up with this for ages until I found your post.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2013-03-22T13:00:27+00:00

    For me the "Clipboard Thief" was Nokia Suite. As Boris said, killing app processes one by one would be the way to find out which app is stealing your clipboard.

    If there was a utility to find all the Clipboard users, it would've been great

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments