Clipboard problem in Excel 2016

Anonymous

I am running Excel 2016 on a Windows 10 Machine.

When I copy a cell (or cut a cell, or move a cell) I get one of two error messages:

"Cannot open the Clipboard"

"We couldn't free up space on the Clipboard. Another program might be using it right now."

I am then able to successfully paste what Excel told me it could not copy. To restate for clarity...Excel throws error messages, but I am able to successfully copy and paste.

The problem is that it throws the error messages every single time I try and copy or cut or whatever.

Things I have tried:

I've ensured all other programs are not running (or using the clip board)

I've cleared the %temp% folder

I've cleared the Clipboard within Excel

Word does not have this problem...

Please help.

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Anonymous

Hello,

I have an update on this error dialog: “There's a problem with the clipboard, but you can still paste your content within this workbook."

When Excel shows this dialog after a copy (CTRL+C) action, it means that another app has a lock on the system clipboard. In this situation you can still paste within Excel. However you cannot paste to another app like Word or Outlook which uses the clipboard.

Last year we made some improvements to Office365 users so that this error message only shows once per Excel instance. This is based on customer feedback - the design change prevents it popping up multiple successive times when the clipboard is locked. We have also considered never showing the error dialog, but there was user feedback that this message is informative and helpful in some cases.

We hope this helps shed some light on this error message. For any design suggestions or new ideas on improving the Excel copy-paste experience, please post to Excel UserVoice.

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255 additional answers

Anonymous

2017-09-26T15:42:11+00:00

This problem suddenly started today on my PC (Windows 10, Office 365), after I tried to add a MS Exchange account to Outlook. The process totally bombed out and I had to start Outlook in Safe mode to get it working again. Anyway, apparently that triggered the issue with the Clipboard in Excel.

I tried your advice and it fixed my problem. Thank you so much! I hope that the rest of the victims here will soon be sorted!

@DennisLong63, what I did was just to close Outlook the same way that one would close any other program, so basically just exit it. When I reopened mine everything was fine. Not sure if this is wht you were looking for.
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Anonymous

2017-09-23T15:51:47+00:00

How does one close Outlook??

Did a search on "how to close Outlook" & all I found was how to totally close the Outlook account.

Microsoft, are you listening??

When are you, Microsoft, going to fix this problem??

I have read in some posts that this has been going on for over two(2) years now. Come on Microsoft, your programmer cannot find and then fix this problem??

That does not make sense.
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Anonymous

2017-09-16T09:40:04+00:00

Thank you for your answer Mike. However, that annoying and pointless dialog still keeps popping up in September 2017. I'm using the latest version of Office 365 on Win10 x64. Is there any chance that Microsoft will finally wake up and fix that issue/bug?

Thank you,

Jiri
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Anonymous

2017-09-02T16:02:40+00:00

Great that you got it to work for you, agree about your M'Soft comment!!

Unfortunately, I don't have Outlook so I'll have to look for something else for my problem.

m
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