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

Just to let you all know I have tried to recreate the problem with Excel 2010 and Win 10, and also Excel 2010 and Win XP, but failed. I used the same spreadsheet saved as .xls, which used to give consistent clipboard use errors when dragging/pasting cells, but no longer.

Whether this remains true long term is open to question at this point in time. All I can say is Office automatc updates are applied.

Whether MS have at some time released a fix is anyones guess. The absence of any MS reply to this issue means we are on our own.

4 years on, still no (useful) reply from anyone at Microsoft.

I don't think they've issued a patch, or if they have it's certainly not for the Win 7 / Office 2010 combination. I have one user of an add-in which serves as a data connection to an OLAP server. She can use it on her old PC with only minimal interference from this accursed dialog box.

However the IT department recently provided her with a newly imaged PC, with the same software. The dialog pops up so many times in the course of a data refresh from the server that it is effectively unusable.

And still, dead silence from Microsoft. Still, no action from Microsoft. Still, Microsoft retains an ostrich-like approach even to issues that would be obscenely easy to fix. (Take out the line of code that shows the dialog box.)

Just to add my two cents' worth - this dialog pops up for me simply when copying a cell's contents (Ctrl+C) - no dragging/dropping involved at all. All I want to do is copy the cell's text so that I can then paste it into another application.

What I found was that the dialog isn't totally meaningless/redundant though - because on trying to paste the contents into the other application, I find that the clipboard is blank. So the dialog is misleading - the clipboard can be emptied, and indeed it is emptied each time - but it's not replaced by the cell's text.

The only way for the copy operation to work successfully is to dismiss the dialog and re-do the Ctrl+C, but sometimes it takes two or three attempts before the copy succeeds without the annoying dialog popup!

Following BorisGR's suggestion, I closed down ZoneAlarm and was amazed that it seemed to fix the issue. I say 'seemed to' because eventually it came back, indicating that it's not a permanent fix, and may have only been coincidental.

For the record, I'm using Office 2010 Home & Student, with Windows 7 Home Premium SP1. I apply all critical updates as they become available.

It was easy to find this thread by googling for the error - but totally unbelievable that it's so many years old, with absolutely no input from MS (on their own forum!) and still no solution.

As I reported in May 2014 it was Nokia Suite that was definitely the culprit for me, apparently conflicting big time with Excel.

Silly that it should be something so simple, but once I took Nokia Suite off the problem disappeared.

Since then, on the odd occasion that I need Nokia Suite I have to run it on an old spare computer and copy things over, which is a nuisance, but better than having a dysfunctional Excel !

Thanks GlenAustralia, but as others have commented, the "culprit" is not Nokia Suite (which I don't use), nor is it ZoneAlarm (which I do), nor is it ANY other third-party app - the culprit is Microsoft Excel itself.

If running two completely separate dedicated PCs - one especially for Nokia Suite and one especially for Excel - seems an acceptable resolution for you, then so be it.

But personally I think that's a bit much to ask of each and every Excel user - and there appear to be many - who's afflicted by this issue, which MS has had several YEARS to reply to and resolve, and which they pointedly have failed to do either.

I don't mean to bemoan MS in a general sense - personally I have found their tech support in other areas to be first-class - but in this particular instance, it can't be denied that it's been simply appalling (in the sense of being non-existent).

Hi Great Southern Hairy Nosed Wombat

Yes I totally agree with you and share your frustrations with Microsoft over this issue.

It is indeed very poor form that users have to go to such lengths to achieve a workaround to a problem which Microsoft has created and then just chosen to ignore.