“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.

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  1. 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.

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

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

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  3. 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.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-07-12T15:20:11+00:00

    The solution that worked for me is disabling MSN messenger addin in Internet Explorer. I am not even sure why it was installed in the first place. I am running Win XP SP3 (I see you shake your head), Office 2010 and IE 8 on my machine.

    One thing is clear. The solution to this problem is not the same for everyone. The most popular "Answer", provided by Community Star Cody C., is to disable the Skype addin. This locked thread comes up on top of the search results, but is inaccurate:

    http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-excel/the-clipboard-cannot-be-emptied-in-excel/4b367423-6c7b-4fc7-9203-23c866255d60

    I am going to adopt the following signature tag line for the coming week -

    --- Contacting the IT support is usually a fruitless endeavor unless you have already found the solution to your own problem.

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-08-08T21:28:10+00:00

    This error was driving me nuts in Excel today and I have never had it happen before.  I do not have Bing desktop or Bing anything, but when I saw your post, I knew you were right.  I have a VNC Viewer application to a remote desktop running, and when I shut that down, the clipboard error went away.  Problem solved!  Thank you, Oasis!

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