Excel clearing clipboard

[paceturr]

What is the behavior of the Excel clipboard when performing various editing insertions like row and column inserts? Using Excel 2010 and 2007 as well versed with 2003. Old savvy computer engineering user. I tried to gleen some understanding via Excel Help but it doesn't discuss the behavior and some searching on the web was overwhelmed by generic copy paste clipboard hits.

What is annoying to this person, and I am guessing it is because I don't understand how to defeat the default setup behavior, is that after copying whatever to the clipboard, and being able to paste such to whatever cells repeatedly, if I then say open up a new row or column, the clipboard contents clear. That forces me to recopy onto the clipboard from whatever source.

If one is copying data in rows between sheets, one must first open up the rows on the target sheet, then go back to the sheet with the row to be copied, perform a copy, return to the target sheet and perform the paste. If there are several sheets to copy the data row into, one would have to inefficiently first open up rows on each sheet (likely to require searching on each sheet so inefficient) then copy to clipboard from the source row, then go to each sheet for the pastes.

A less tedious method would be to paste the text onto say an open Find/Replace popup field on another open window. Then go to the first target sheet, open a row (that clears the clipboard), copy the Find field back to the clipboard, paste that into the row. Then one goes to the next sheet and repeats. Of course all this in so inefficient I have to believe I am simply not aware of something.

 

[paceturr]

^

 

[shg]

Welcome to the board.

I believe Excel automated from VBA behaves the same way as from the UI; certain operations clear the clipboard, evidenced by the disappearance of the 'marching ants.'

If you have a specific code example, someone may be able to suggest an alternative.

 

[paceturr]

Yes using VBA would be a more structural way to describe the above. However the nature of the issue is rather simple haha. Am not versed in that syntax although I can imagine ways it would be useful and may do so at some point. Instead when manipulating text etc, I tend to relie on old ported UNIX commands like sed, awk, etc sticking them in a dos batch file.

 

[Kenneth Hobson]

Use the Office Clipboard in those cases. In 2010, start it from the arrow to the right of the word Clipboard on the left side of the ribbon.

 

[paceturr]

Thankyou Kenneth.

That little arrow was visually obvious enough. After noticing "clipboard" was grayed out and inactive to mouse clicking, I seem to have psychologically filtered out that area from being of use.