"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
    2019-01-11T04:03:52+00:00

    This fix makes no difference to my Excel.

    And it happens every time - so with 5000 rows of data to edit I've just given up :-(

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-01-11T04:07:32+00:00

    So how did you find out which app had "captured" clipboard?

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-01-11T16:09:22+00:00

    So how did you find out which app had "captured" clipboard?

    @Mike Maxey's post is the most useful in explaining what the hell Microsoft has done and what really causes this error "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."

    I went through ALL of the (now 20 pages worth) posts in this thread, and looked for the responses which weren't the usual "turn off preview mode" crap and found the responses which indicated/hinted what other apps others were reporting that might be using the clipboard.

    I know what apps are installed on my laptop and how they function so it didn't take long to narrow this down and (if I recall correctly) someone in one of the responses in this post may have actually called out Beyond Compare as a potential culprit. I don't remember. **shrug**

    I do know this there is no setting in Excel that fixes this. So any post in this thread which tells you to do XY or Z in Excel or MS Office is wishing upon a star.. Microsoft has made it impossible to disable this clipboard warning check in their application. So you need to find the application which is also locking the clipboard and see if they (smartly) gave you an option to disable their clipboard feature which is causing this stupid warning to fire.

    For me it was Beyond Compare which had a lock on the clipboard. Once I disabled the clipboard compare feature of the app my life was golden again.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-01-11T18:41:59+00:00

    Crystal Jones, it sounds like you should be working for Microsoft. For those of us who don't know how to track down the internal workings of software we may or may not have knowingly installed, much less how to disable features of those applications safely, can you provide a procedure or reference a resource for doing this?

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