Cut/Copy and Paste Problems in PowerPoint

Anonymous
2013-09-30T02:03:09+00:00

PowerPoint will not allow me to paste anything into a slide.  I have tried text into a text box, shapes, entire slides.  It allows me to copy or cut, but when I try to paste it is greyed out or does nothing when I use Command+V on my MacBook Pro.  I am running Office 2011 Home & Student and copy and paste work fine in Word and Xcel.  I have tried to reinstall the software and that didn.t help either... Any ideas?

Microsoft 365 and Office | PowerPoint | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-08-09T20:56:49+00:00

    I was having the same problem, but was able to solve it.  I'm posting this in hopes that it may help others.

    I turned off Dictation in my System Preferences (under Dictation/Speech) and then rebooted my Mac.  It appears to be working now.

    I have no idea why this worked (I read that the new Dictation is giving random problems, so I gave it a try on this problem).

    Hope this helps.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-07-18T02:33:08+00:00

    Thanks to everyone who has participated in this investigation. I’ve alerted Microsoft to the problem. It definitely seems to be related to PowerPoint on certain hardware. 

    If you are affected and have direct Microsoft support, please contact them so additional cases can be added to their case logs. If you don’t have direct support, go to the PowerPoint Help menu and choose the send Feedback option to display the feedback form. Explain the details of your hardware, os, powerpoint version and describe the problem. You might copy the URL of this thread and paste that in as a reference. Microsoft doesn’t generally reply to the feedback submissions, but if you include your contact information in your feedback at least they could contact you if they wanted to.

    Hi, is this problem resolved ? I have a MacBook Pro in the office which is having exactly the same issue and can't seems to resolve it.

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  3. Jim G 134.1K Reputation points MVP
    2014-05-16T16:05:41+00:00

    Just to summarize...

    The clipboard is an interaction between PowerPoint and Mac OS X. There seems to be a problem on certain Macs using the clipboard in PowerPoint but not other applications. The symptoms persist even after performing the following actions:

    1. Try making a new user account in Mac OS X preferences. Log into the new user account. The problem persists even in the new user account, which lets us rule out bad PowerPoint preference files as potential source of the trouble.
    2. Try using PowerPoint after doing a Safe Boot. This rules out the source of the problem being due to any of the many things affected when you do a safe boot, including having a messed up font cache.
    3. Reinstall Office after first completely removing Office. Be sure you are connected to the internet when reinstalling so that AutoUpdate can properly update Office to the current version.
    4. Using Disk Utility to verify the startup disk and repair disk permissions.
    5. Reinstall Mac OS X. 

    If you have done ALL of these things and PowerPoint is still not working with the clipboard, then please contact Microsoft Support (see options near the bottom of this page). If your organization has Microsoft Support incidents, this would be a good time to use one.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-05-13T18:00:49+00:00

    Richard,

    I did the repair disk permission, but the issue remains.

    Thank you

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