Widening your pasting horizons

By | June 10, 2024

Today, I’m going to share a computer tip with you that came from a friend of mine, which should help you out with your copying and pasting needs.

Now I’ve said for years that when you cut or copy a line of text, or a file, or an image, it goes to the clipboard, which is a temporary holding zone on your computer that you can’t really see.  Your computer keeps whatever you’ve cut or copied in this temporary holding zone until you either paste it somewhere else, or you cut or copy something new.

And that’s still mostly true – but now (on Windows computers) you have the option to actually see what’s being stored in the clipboard, and you can have several things in there at once.  And it couldn’t be easier to turn this feature on.

All you do is hold down the Windows key on the keyboard, and while you have it held down, tap on the letter V once.  A little box will pop up, with a message that says “Turn on clipboard history to copy and view multiple items”, and you just need to click on the “Turn on” button underneath.

Then the next time you cut or copy something, you can use the same shortcut (Windows + V) to bring up the clipboard, and you can choose which bit of text – or whatever you want to paste – by clicking on it in the box.  So that can be handy if you’ve got lots of separate things that need pasting.

However, the only thing to remember is that the next time you shut down or restart the computer, the clipboard gets completely cleared out.  So it’s not a good place to store anything important, because it isn’t a permanent location.

And for Mac users, you can see what’s on the clipboard by opening Finder, clicking on “Edit” in the very top left of the screen, and then clicking on “Show Clipboard” in the menu that appears.

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