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

I faced this issue and found that the logging feature enabled with one of the ftp clients (winscp) have caused the error. I have turned off the logging feature and still faced this issue, once I terminated that program, the issue resolved.

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

I have been able to eliminate the Excel clipboard error issue by opening up a blank document in Word and cutting (right click) and pasting a cell from Excel into the blank Word document. After that, Excell works fine, and it's goodbye to the annoying "Clipboard cannot be emptied..." popup error. You will also notice that when you now do a drag and drop in Excel, it happens instantaneously (as expected). You can close Word after doing the cut and past workaround, and everything will still be fine with Excel. However you will have to go through this procedure every time your reboot your PC and open Excel again.

I hope other Excel users can replicate this workaround and maybe MS will pick up on it.

Cheers,

Tony

This also occurs if you have file explorer open and in preview mode. 

Turn off the Office Clipboard and clear its contents and check.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/copy-and-paste-multiple-items-by-using-the-office-clipboard-HA010163602.aspx

Take a look at this as well.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-excel/the-clipboard-cannot-be-emptied-in-excel/4b367423-6c7b-4fc7-9203-23c866255d60

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

I have been getting annoyed by this as well.

I found UltraVNC viewer was the offending app for me