“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
    2013-08-21T09:00:23+00:00

    I do not use Skype, Outlook, Firefox or Google Chrome, all of which are some of the apparent culprits with this problem.  In my case the culprit is Zone Alarm Pro (version 11.0.768.000), issued in July 2013.  No problems with Zone Alarm Pro before that.  When I turn it off my Excel problem does not happen.  Turn it back on and the annoying message reappears.  Hope this helps some of you.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-09-03T16:21:30+00:00

    OneNote did it for me. Not sure why but it seems like it is the Microsoft Products that causes the issues. I even rebooted the system but that did not fix the issue either until I turned off One Note completely off.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-10-25T17:20:19+00:00

    Microsoft,

    Error: “The Clipboard cannot be emptied. Another program might be using the Clipboard”

    Culprit: Excel 2010/2013.

    This is not the fault of Chrome, Bing, OneNote, etc...

    It is not because the document is on the network, local, SkyDrive, USB, being eaten by grimlins.

    It is not whether you drag the cell, copy and paste, make it into Origami animals.

    The problem is Excel.  Sure, one application or another may be using Clipboard but the common denominator is still Excel.  Blame all the applications and forms of usage that bring about this error and still it is Excel.

    So, can we please have a fix for this that fixes Excel and stop blaming everyone/thing else.

    Thank you,

    Deron

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  4. 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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  5. 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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