“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
    2014-05-11T09:11:58+00:00

    For me it was Nokia Suite that was causing the problem.

    I put up with this nonsense for years on my PC not knowing what was causing it.

    It was only when I recently switched to a Mac running Excel 2010 in Parallels that I noticed, straight after I installed Nokia Suite (in Parallels) the bug came back, bigger than ever, even when Nokia Suite was closed.

    Somebody at Experts Exchange suggested I remove Nokia Suite and it worked, so far no problems, I've got a sensible my Excel back!

    It really is silly that a prominent program like Excel can get cruelled by a program like Nokia Suite even when it is closed.

    Now, of course, I have to find another way to download my Nokia photos and texts on the Mac, short of having two computers.   (My Nokia phone is a 4 year old Symbian model that I love).

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-05-12T16:44:00+00:00

    Alas, Microsoft has chosen to ignore our cries for assistance on these bugs.  

    It seems that only a few people on this forum have even blamed Excel for the being the culprit.  I really don't get it gang.  This is no different than if you blamed everyone else for one bad employee's inability to get along.  Excel keeps crying for no reason and makes everyone else stop and look.  

    Time we send Excel to time-out.

    db

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-09-09T18:55:24+00:00

    I have been getting annoyed by this as well.

    I found UltraVNC viewer was the offending app for me

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-02-21T12:04:22+00:00

    I know this is an old thread but the problem remains with Win 8.1 and Excel 2010.

    After fresh start can drag and drop cells ok. Dried to drag and drop again and get the stupid error message. This implies that "another program" using the clipboard is Excel. As the drag and drop actions do infact work, I have just got used to clicking the [OK] box from the error message and carrying on. I do not have Zonealarm, Skype Add-on, Nokia Suite, or VNC viewer.

    This is a long running and very annoying irritation affecting the most used application of Office 2010 IMO.

    It irritates me furher in that you can't actually see which application has grabbed the clipboard. So you end up chasing shadows and closing down possible processes without any effect.

    Ed

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-02-22T01:47:52+00:00

    I know this is an old thread but the problem remains with Win 8.1 and Excel 2010.

    Indeed it does. I can't believe the extent to which Microsoft just doesn't care about this blight on usability and, by extension, its customers. Some idiot in there seems to have a fixation on more dialogs, ever more dialogs, even though they may do nothing useful and indeed obstruct you from doing anything useful.

    And all they need to do to sort this out, ALL they need to do... is disable the dialog.

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