“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: Oldest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2013-02-19T17:24:51+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.

    Thank you for your input, this clipboard problem has been driving me nuts. As soon as I read this I checked if Skype was running, it was (autostart)  and as soon as I killed it my clipboard problem went away. This was only a problem with my Excel 2013, I also have excel 2007 and it worked without an issue.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2013-02-27T16:45:47+00:00

    I am also having this problem with Excel 2010 on Windows 7. My machine has never had bing desktop or skype installed and I can reproduce it without opening Outlook 2010. I have also disabled the "Always copy snips to the Clipboard" option in the snipping tool.

    The “Clipboard cannot be emptied. Another program might be using the Clipboard” error message only occurs when I use the cursor to drag the selection from one cell to another. I never receive the message when I use the cut and paste feature. Since I use Excel about 30 hours each week, this message and I have become well acquainted.

    Any advice would be welcome. I'm game to use any utility that would let me troubleshoot this further. In a previous thread about this issue it seemed that some people had luck monitoring which programs were accessing the clipboard but I don't know how to go about doing that.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2013-02-27T17:18:20+00:00

    Hi Sam, the way I went about figuring out that ZoneAlarm was the problem was by going into the task manager killing a process, opening excel trying to drag a cell, closing excel killing the next process and repeating until the error stopped coming up, it sounds cumbersome but this issue was really bothering me and I'm happy I did it, luckily I didn't have a ton of processes running as I had recently reinstalled my pc.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. 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
  5. 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