"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
    2018-04-11T23:48:36+00:00

    Am using Office 365, Windows 10 Pro

    Just ck'ed File / Options / General and uncheck Enable Live Preview.

    Mine has not been checked for months.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-04-11T21:33:51+00:00

    I was able to work around this issue by disabling the Live Preview.

    In Excel, go to File / Options / General and uncheck Enable Live Preview.

    Windows 7 Pro

    Excel 2016

    Best regards,

    John

    This worked for me in Office 365, Windows 10 Pro

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-04-11T19:57:55+00:00

    It is finally time for everyone on this thread to realize something. This is an organization that does not know how to design a window manager that supports "focus follows mouse". Whether or not Microsoft is aware of this problem or not, and they most certainly are, it should be painfully clear by now that they simply do not care.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-04-11T19:06:59+00:00

    It's good to know what causes the problem, but that does nothing to solve the highlighting problem once the message displays.  In order to highlight a cell(s) I have to shut down Excel and reopen it.  Without doing this, there is no way to know what you have selected to copy/cut, etc.

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