Ever wish Excel could remember the last 10 things you copied to the clipboard, and would let you paste any of them? In fact, you can get it to remember the last 24, when you activate the Office Clipboard.
Suppose you’re working with a long list of company names that you need to copy and paste repeatedly:
Activate the Office Clipboard by clicking the button on the lower right-hand corner of the Clipboard group on the Home tab:
This opens up the Office Clipboard – the default view is a narrow window on the left side of the screen. Every time you copy a cell, part of a cell, a picture, or anything else, it is listed in this window, from most to least recent:
Beautiful Enterprise is now clipboard item 1 of 24 . . .
. . . and Cisco Linksys Kiss is now item 2 of 24.
Paste any item from the clipboard by clicking on it, or selecting Paste from the dropdown attached to that item on the clipboard:
Once you hit 24 items, Office will start to recycle the clipboard entries starting with the oldest ones. You can delete items you no longer need to make room for new ones. There is a counter in the lower right-hand corner of the screen that keeps track of how many items you’ve pasted:
You can unpin the clipboard from the left side of the screen and move it to a more convenient place on your screen. Simply click on the header of the clipboard and drag it where you want it. It will now appear as a standalone window:
Click the Options button at the bottom of the window to see what else you can do. For example, you can select Collect without Showing Office Clipboard, and Office will continue to collect multiple items, and tell you how many you have, without displaying the clipboard:
The Office clipboard can be used across applications; that means that the multiple items you copied from an Excel spreadsheet can be pasted into a Word document, or vice-versa:
Hope you enjoy this new tip, and feel free to share, link, or repost. Follow the Excel Esquire blog to get updates, and to learn about CLE-accredited Excel workshops!
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