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“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://excelribbon.tips.net/T009810_Cant_Empty_the_Clipboard.html
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1wyab60d(VS.90).aspx
A family of Microsoft spreadsheet software with tools for analyzing, charting, and communicating data.
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.
This is a real nuisance. It is not related to "shared" files. None of my files are shared. It doesn't actually prevent the pasting activity, but the repeated false errors are annoying.
Have you tried ‘clean boot’? (see my prev post)
For most people, Bing desktop seems to be the issue. I have also noticed that this can happen if you’re connected to any remote desktop sessions (VNC). If you’re using one, I would suggest to disconnect from that and check the status.
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.
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.
Shutting down Bing worked for me! Come on Microsoft - get this fixed!!
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