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

Anonymous
2020-04-08T18:30:07+00:00

I am using the Microsoft Office 365 Business desktop app, and as of this posting am running Windows 10 version 1903 (OS Build 18362.720) on this particular laptop. This problem has been witnessed across multiple computers, Windows 10 versions, Microsoft accounts, all while using the Office 365 app.

I track a lot of data in Excel and often copy cells from it and paste them into online forms, ETC. Within the last few weeks I have started getting a pop up when I try to copy a cell that says "There's a problem with the clipboard, but you can still paste this content within this workbook."

It does not seem to matter if the file is stored locally or not.

I have found that if I continue to press Ctrl+v 2 to 4 more times it usually at some point copies the data as it should, without the pop up, and allows me to paste it wherever I want.

I searched for an answer to what is going on and or if there is a solution, and found that people have been periodically having this problem for years, and but could not find a solution that worked despite a post on this site having over 20 pages of replies and over 1500 reports of having the same problem, before comments were locked due to the thread age.

I have tried repairing the app without success. I have tried updating Office, which did do an update but did not solve the problem. I've restarted the computer and Excel many times.

This is making use of Excel inefficient and annoying. I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before I and others I've spoken with that are experiencing the same thing, are not able to paste outside of the workbook at all. As is, I may as well just type everything again instead of bothering with the broken copy/paste feature.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-12-04T19:47:45+00:00

    This worked for me on an HP Envy laptop running Windows 10 and Microsoft Excel 365.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-12-02T16:32:53+00:00

    For the record, I do not have "Use LinkedIn features" enabled in Excel and, to the best of my recollection, never have.

    I have observed that how often I get the "There's a problem with the clipboard" error seems to vary over time.  Alas, I haven't been able to correlate this with anything else I am doing at the time.

    I suspect--based on the comments in this thread--that there may be more than one condition that causes this error to occur.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-09-28T23:32:42+00:00

    I encountered the same problem in Office 2019 and I have  tried all the suggestions in this thread to no avail. This is definitely something Microsoft need to fix. I run Windows 10 64 bit. My memory is 32GB. I found a semi-workaround: not a fix.  I got the same warning message when I executed a copy command

    I was able to paste the copied contents in:

    (1) The same spreadsheet tab,

    (2)  An adjacent tab of the same workbook;

    (3)  Another workbook occupying the same workspace (i.e., a  workbook opened within the same instance of Excel by using File ---> Open) as the source workbook.

    Microsoft need to ascertain the whether there is a property in clipboard that defines the coverage of the clipboard. It is possible that a bug is changing the value of that property to local only.

    Other people have reported either the same, or a very similar, problem in other versions of Office/Excel.  This definitely seems to be somewhere in the base code of Excel, or of clipboard, as you suggest.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-09-07T17:42:26+00:00

    I get the same error message using Office 2019

    Microsoft Excel 2019 MSO 16.0.13029.20342  64 bit.

    I was also losing the cell pointer every time until I turned off hardware graphics acceleration under File>Options.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-08-14T10:08:19+00:00

    Having googled generally, if you disable live preview in general options, that will fix the problem, but you may be left without contextual information when you hover over anitem. Having said that, I still seem to be getting them ... about time Microsoft fixed the problem for real

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