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

Anonymous

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

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63 answers

Anonymous

2016-11-03T06:51:22+00:00

OMG!!! it's outlook.

OMG!!! It's not Outlook! It. Is. Excel. The fact that closing Outlook worked for you (for now) does not mean that there is not a problem In. Excel.

There is no pressure on Microsoft to fix Excel as long as people keep coming in here crying "Yipee, I found a (probably temporary, until the next program that Excel doesn't work with) solution to my problem! I shut down some other program to "fix" it".

As Deron Braun put it with exceptional clarity:

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.
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Anonymous

2016-11-03T00:40:42+00:00

OMG!!! it's outlook. I have been putting up with this for months now, and lead to tearing my hair out this morning I came here. Closed outlook and haven't had a problem since.

THANK YOU!!!! (ANDREY_3d - NOT YOU MICROSOFT!!!)

Also, does anyone know why you have to use the keyboard to paste into the filter search field????
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Anonymous

2016-10-12T22:59:56+00:00

For everyone who is affected by this, I've raised a request to get rid of it on the (relatively) little-known User Voice site:

Link to User Voice here.

Adding your voice and votes to this may or may not help... but it certainly can't hurt.
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Anonymous

2016-05-12T07:16:32+00:00

I had this error message in Excel 2010 while Outlook was working in the backgroung. Shutting down Outlook solved this problem.
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Anonymous

2016-04-04T10:37:13+00:00

Yes, there's only one common denominator at play here.

I think there's a clue about Microsoft's own cluelessness about what is causing it in the error message itself.
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