"there's a problem with the clipboard, but you can still paste this content within this workbook"

Anonymous
2016-11-17T14:55:36+00:00

Perhaps someone could direct to a discussion where this has been tackled, but I keep getting this error "there's a problem with the clipboard, but you can still past this content within this workbook " with simple cut/copy and paste actions in Excel.  The error box pops up and an alert sounds (which is super annoying) after every paste.  I can still perform the actions however my selection is not highlighted and I can't be sure that I have selected the correct information until I do a paste in the same, or another, worksheet. I have Excel 2016 in Office 365 on a machine running Windows 10.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2017-02-28T16:18:43+00:00

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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  1. Anonymous
    2018-02-22T13:48:29+00:00

    Seen this issue recently on a new laptop we got in..

    tried all the fixes i could find and the only way to stop it was to add the user to the local admin group. not ideal and we cant roll this out to other users if we see this again but for this particular user we made the exception.

    hopefully a real fix will be issued in due time..

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-02-22T13:30:49+00:00

    This is inaccurate information.

    The error message persists after repeated instances and the error message is profoundly unhelpful.

    Updates and Repairs do not fix the problem.

    How is Microsoft still unaware and unresponsive to this issue?

    Because Microsoft does not care about it's customers. Microsoft just wants to make MONEY.

    This problem with EXCEL has been going on for years.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-02-22T04:20:57+00:00

    This is inaccurate information.

    The error message persists after repeated instances and the error message is profoundly unhelpful.

    Updates and Repairs do not fix the problem.

    How is Microsoft still unaware and unresponsive to this issue?

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-02-09T22:11:31+00:00

    Thanks - disabled a lot of junk from the startup manager.  We'll see where this goes.  Thanks again for your response.

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