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

Ever find a fix for ZoneAlarm affecting Excel clipboard?

The responses concerning this issue have continuously pointed towards other programs needing to be closed to halt this issue.  I have tried closing numerous programs and may stop it for a while but then have the problem come back after a while.  

Due to the fact that this is a constant issue with Excel; closing numerous other programs is not the solution.  This is a temporary fix to a permanent issue.

Microsoft,  please tell us what we can do within Excel to stop this problem.  Excel is an enterprise class product and should not have issues that would normally be sound in Beta products.

Deron Braun

Support Engineer

Tech Data Corporation

Amen that, brother! I have this problem only intermittently on my home machines but it's like one of the ten plagues of Egypt on the machines that I use at work. To make it go away one, ONE, ONLY one thing needs to happen... and that's for MS to release a patch for Excel that removes the brain dead bit of code that shows this dialog. The clipboard cannot be emptied? Great, good for the clipboard. But Microsoft, here's the thing that you just don't seem to understand... I. Don't. Give. A. S***. I really, truly don't. The fact that the clipboard cannot be emptied has never once affected me doing what I'm doing except for the need to close that useless sodding dialog.

I can't recall whether this is one of the many, many dialogs that have a "Was this helpful?" link for the customer improvement program but if not, it should be even at the risk of wearing out my mouse clicking on the NO! button. The thing that goes beyond irritating and toward the border of infuriating is that on NONE of the dialogs which have a Customer Improvement "was this helpful" link is there a "Never, ever show me this waste of time again" checkbox. The fact that MS has seen fit to include the "was this helpful" question suggests that somewhere, deep in the bowels of Redmond, someone has a sneaking suspicion that the dialogs are a complete waste of time and an irritation to the user. And yet, MS provides them with no easy way and/or no way at all of turning them off. The "The File You Are Trying To Open is in a different format" dialog, I'm glaring with contempt at you as well, though it doesn't screw up my work experience quite as badly as the Clipboard one. And at least the extension hardening one has a Registry hack which lets you turn it off which as far as I know the Clipboard waste of space doesn't.

I swear, Microsoft seems to have learnt absolutely nothing from the revulsion that the marketplace felt for Vista, in no small part because it kept throwing pointless dialogs in your face.

If anyone from Microsoft actually bothers reading these posts, then I suggest that before you alienate any more users, you do something about fixing things like this. It's not like you can afford to take your user base for granted any more.

The responses concerning this issue have continuously pointed towards other programs needing to be closed to halt this issue.  I have tried closing numerous programs and may stop it for a while but then have the problem come back after a while.  

Due to the fact that this is a constant issue with Excel; closing numerous other programs is not the solution.  This is a temporary fix to a permanent issue.

Microsoft,  please tell us what we can do within Excel to stop this problem.  Excel is an enterprise class product and should not have issues that would normally be sound in Beta products.

Deron Braun

Support Engineer

Tech Data Corporation

Amen that, brother! I have this problem only intermittently on my home machines but it's like one of the ten plagues of Egypt on the machines that I use at work. To make it go away one, ONE, ONLY one thing needs to happen... and that's for MS to release a patch for Excel that removes the brain dead bit of code that shows this dialog. The clipboard cannot be emptied? Great, good for the clipboard. But Microsoft, here's the thing that you just don't seem to understand... I. Don't Give. A. S***. I really, truly don't. The fact that the clipboard cannot be emptied has never once affected me doing what I'm doing except for the need to close that useless sodding dialog.

I can't recall whether this is one of the many, many dialogs that have a "Was this helpful?" link for the customer improvement program but if not, it should be even at the risk of wearing out my mouse clicking on the NO! button. The thing that goes beyond irritating and toward the border of infuriating is that on NONE of the dialogs which have a Customer Improvement "was this helpful" link is there a "Never, ever show me this waste of time again" checkbox. The fact that MS has seen fit to include the "was this helpful" question suggests that somewhere, deep in the bowels of Redmond, someone has a sneaking suspicion that the dialogs are a complete waste of time and an irritation to the user. And yet, MS provides them with no easy way and/or no way at all of turning them off. The "The File You Are Trying To Open is in a different format" dialog, I'm glaring with contempt at you as well, though it doesn't screw up my work experience quite as badly as the Clipboard one. And at least the extension hardening one has a Registry hack which lets you turn it off which as far as I know the Clipboard waste of space doesn't.

I swear, Microsoft seems to have learnt absolutely nothing from the revulsion that the marketplace felt for Vista, in no small part because it kept throwing pointless dialogs in your face.

If anyone from Microsoft actually bothers reading these posts, then I suggest that before you alienate any more users, you do something about fixing things like this. It's not like you can afford to take your user base for granted any more.

Finally another somewhat sane person appears.  I was beginning to think I was the only one who understood that this wasn't a problem with all the other products but a problem with Excel.  Perhaps someday they will fix it.  and perhaps someday Bill G. will hire me on for a million a year to be his court jester.

db

I get this if I have VNC running.  It stops if I close VNC.

Yes, I agree with the total waste of time of clicking about the status of the clipboard.

I also found out that closing VNC eliminated the problem. But well, VNC is the source of my data 95% of the time. If I need a dedicated PC, with a dedicated clipboard to run excel, that's quite deceiving.

I am testing the other hint, which tells that saving your sheet eliminates the issue. Seems to work, and to confirm, definitely that it is a bug in excel clipboard management.

LC