“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
    2013-12-04T12:46:55+00:00

    Until Microsoft get round to fixing Excel!

    I had the problem on a laptop running Excel Starter.

    I stopped PhraseExpress on the laptop and the problem went away.

    My desktop machine runs Excel 2007 and PhraseExpress without any problems.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-11-08T20:07:34+00:00

    I am baffled why so many people point to other programs causing the problem.  This issue is obviously an issue with Excel.  

    This is like dealing with people.  If one person has problems with everyone you do not reprimand all the other employees you reprimand the person who is at the center of the issue.

    Excel has problems with everyone and needs to be fixed.  There is no reason a person should have to close each program on their system till they find the culprit.  Excel is still running and thus is still open.  Of course, now you have another program you may need closed.

    Microsoft, please fix the culprit.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-11-08T18:51:42+00:00

    Like others have pointed out, one has to start closing out programs one by one until they stop getting the annoying pop-ups, and it could differ depending on the PC.

    At my job, we don't have Skype.  We do use Microsoft Lync and it was the first thing I signed out of and closed down... bang, no more clipboard problems.  I got lucky, it was the first thing I tried closing.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-10-28T21:02:26+00:00

    Hello,

     

    For information, closing Outlook did it for me. At the time, only Outlook and IE10 were open on a standalone Workstation running one instance of Excel 2010 x32 on W7 x64. I was viewing the Office clipboard content. Clipboard was always empty or virtually empty (1 or 2 items, the ones I had just copied pasted in Excel). Before closing Outlook (& IE10) instance(s), every 2 or 3 consecutive copy/paste in Excel and the message would appear. After closing Outlook, this occurrence had disappeared entirely despite several dozens of consecutive copy pastes in a row I executed just afterwards. At least, thanks to this forum, I suspect now it comes from a kind of contention and as a workaround, I can terminate the potential "culprits" with a good chance to get rid of it.   

     

    acontrario

    Brussels

    Brussels,

    The culprit is Excel.  If Excel has this problem then logic dictates that Excel is the culprit.  You cannot blame every other program becasue they do not play well with Excel.  They work fine with each other.  Excel is the program with the issues.

    Deron

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-10-28T19:50:44+00:00

    Hello,

    For information, closing Outlook did it for me. At the time, only Outlook and IE10 were open on a standalone Workstation running one instance of Excel 2010 x32 on W7 x64. I was viewing the Office clipboard content. Clipboard was always empty or virtually empty (1 or 2 items, the ones I had just copied pasted in Excel). Before closing Outlook (& IE10) instance(s), every 2 or 3 consecutive copy/paste in Excel and the message would appear. After closing Outlook, this occurrence had disappeared entirely despite several dozens of consecutive copy pastes in a row I executed just afterwards. At least, thanks to this forum, I suspect now it comes from a kind of contention and as a workaround, I can terminate the potential "culprits" with a good chance to get rid of it.   

    acontrario

    Brussels

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