“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 No comments

63 answers

Sort by: Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2013-01-07T21:30:16+00:00

    I don't have Bing Desktop and I get the same error message, from time to time. If I stop and save my workbook, the error message doesn't appear for a while. It seems to pop up when I am doing a lot of copying and pasting without saving in between. But, I didn't have a problem with this message until after I changed from excel 2007 to 2010.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  2. Anonymous
    2013-01-15T15:36:46+00:00

    Have you tried ‘clean boot’? (see my prev post)

    For most people, Bing desktop seems to be the issue. I have also noticed that this can happen if you’re connected to any remote desktop sessions (VNC). If you’re using one, I would suggest to disconnect from that and check the status.

    Was this answer helpful?

    10+ people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  3. Anonymous
    2013-01-18T17:20:39+00:00

    Shutting down Bing worked for me! Come on Microsoft - get this fixed!!

    opsintegrity.com

    Was this answer helpful?

    2 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  4. Anonymous
    2013-01-26T13:36:08+00:00

    This is now a known issue with Bing Desktop, and it would be best if you provide a feedback to Microsoft regarding this.

    You may provide your feedback/suggestions regarding Microsoft Bing in the link mentioned below:

    https://feedback.discoverbing.com/default.aspx?productkey=bing

    Note: You can use the same link to provide feedback for Bing Desktop.

    Was this answer helpful?

    2 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  5. Anonymous
    2013-02-02T13:27:45+00:00

    Just wanted to let people know, after spending quite a bit of time online and realizing that most people point to Skype add-in or a few picture/video editor programs as the cause of this issue I found my issue to be caused by ZoneAlarm firewall.  I found this after literally killing one process at a time in task manager reopening Excel and testing dragging a cell.  Only after I killed ZoneAlarm did this stupid popup stop, not sure what ZoneAlarm is doing that causes this but it must be something in their most recent update because I've used this firewall for many years without any Excel issues, including 2010 until about 3 months ago when my HDD crashed and I had to reinstall everything, which is when this issue came up.  Now that I've found the program that causes it, I'll research which setting because it seems weird that a firewall would need the clipboard.

    Was this answer helpful?

    7 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments