The Windows Clipboard is central to many things, but it quietly works in the background. The very Copy & Paste operations are carried out using Windows Clipboard. In some sense, the Windows native clipboard works like the real-world clipboard; you can store things that you need to use it repeatedly or even once. While third-party Clipboard Managers are a better choice for these jobs, not everyone needs the advanced tool, and the built-in Windows Clipboard will suffice. In this segment, we will walk you through some super cool tips to manage the Windows Clipboard.
Windows Clipboard Manager Tips & Tricks
When you copy or cut or move data, it is held temporarily in an invisible portion of memory. This is called the ClipBoard. The clipboard enables applications to transfer data or between applications or within an application. Windows XP had clipbrd.exe, referred to as the Clipboard Viewer or the ClipBook Viewer, which could be used to see what was saved on your clipboard. If you try to search for this exe file in Windows 11/10/8/7, you will be unable to find clipbrd.exe.
How to open the Windows Clipboard
Well, one might wonder how they can access the Windows clipboard. Well, the answer to this is you cannot – but you can open the Clipboard History panel now, though. The Clipboard is a built-in function and only allows you to copy-paste a single value, be it texts or images. Every time you copy another value, the old one gets overwritten. Moreover, the Clipboard is also reset every time your PC reboots. It’s worth mentioning that you could view the clipboard in Windows XP and Windows Vista, but the functionality didn’t make it to Windows 11/10.
Read: How to use New and Improved Clipboard in Windows 11.
A simple way to clear your clipboard?
Most of us end using the clipboard to copy-paste passwords/passphrases or even private keys. While this is not dangerous per say, not erasing your clipboard is not a safe practice. It is quite possible that someone might access your clipboard and get hold of the Clipboard history.
The best way to clear your clipboard history is to overwrite it. You can simply copy some gibberish text. Alternatively, you can also copy an image from a website.
But wait – there is another way! You can create a Desktop shortcut that will help you clear the clipboard.
How to share your Clipboard Content?
What if you want to share the clipboard content? One way to do this is to copy-paste and use a messaging service or even an email. But that is simply a tedious thing to do. The best way is to use Team Viewer in order to access the Clipboard on your PC. This will also be useful when you want to access your clipboard remotely. The prerequisite for this to work is that both the PCs have to be turned on and of course they should be running Windows.
Open the Remote Desktop Connection by going to the Start Menu. Once opened head over to Local Resources. In this window, you will see a Tick box against “Clipboard.” Make sure the box is ticked. Now connect the same to the remote network.
How to copy text in Plaintext formatting?
It is very common for us to copy things like quotes or other content to use it in our works. For instance, we at TheWindowsClub copy quotes from the Microsoft folks. However, most of the time we end up copying the formatting and this is sure to mess up things. Now, this is where a nifty little utility called Pure Text will come in handy.
With Pure Text you can copy the article without the rich formatting including bold, italics, underlining, tables, and other embedded objects. So what this utility does is that it removes all sorts of formatting. You can download Pure Text from the homepage.
If you are looking for a feature-rich clipboard manager, you want to take a look at these free Clipboard Manager software for Windows. They let you do a lot more!
Read next:How to use the Cloud Clipboard feature in Windows.
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