A Great Question
I had a great question from Teresa, one of my readers last week. She, like all of us, copies and paste things in her computer all the time.
You know how it goes. You find a recipe on a webpage you want to try out. You click on it with your left mouse button, drag down and across it to the bottom. Then, depending on your preference and previous experience you copy it…but how? OK, here is the shortlist, you may choose to right-click on the selection with your mouse and choose copy. You may also like to use the program you are in and click on the copy button if it has one. My favorite is to use the keyboard combination of the Control key plus the “C” key (CTRL+C).
Then you take that information and paste it into your file. Again, there are a couple of choices. Right-click and choose Paste. Then, my favorite, CTRL+V. You may have wondered why “C” is used for Copy and “V” for Paste, why not “P” for Paste? The reason is that CTRL+P is for Print so they had to come up with something else.
So next you can go to another site and copy something else. Maybe a picture or a web address for something on sale you want to buy. You paste those in your appropriate locations. Then you grab a few more copied items. Later in the day you come back to your PC and need something you copied four hours ago or sometime much earlier in the day. You have to find it, copy it, and repaste it all over again.
Teresa asked about some software that will keep all of your copies from the day available so you can use them over. It was only about $10. But you know me, I do not like to pay for things you can get free. And since the Windows 10 update at the end of 2018, this is built into Windows…for free.
It is called, “Clipboard History” and is easy to install and use. It will keep up to the last 25 items you have copied available in your computer’s clipboard until you restart your computer or clear the history. If there is something you use more often, say a picture, you may copy that and pin it to the history. A pinned item will remain until unpinned, even if you restart your computer. It will store anything you copy up to 4 MB in size.
Set Up Clipboard History
To set it up click on the Windows start menu button and start typing “Clipboard settings” and click it when you see it. Then look down to the area labeled, “Clipboard history.” Move the switch from Off to On, off is the default setting. That is it.
Now copy anything you would like, webpages, pictures, text from documents, articles, URLs, etc. When you are ready to paste something, tap the Windows Menu Key and the “V” key, just like you would normally do the CTRL+V. When the window pops up let go of the keys. The window will show you a list of up to the past 25 copies that you have made, scroll to the one you want to paste, click it and it will paste. Make sure you do not hold the Windows Key down too long or your menu will pop up.
Clipboard History Settings
Also, notice to the top-right edge of each item there are three gray dots. Click the dots and you will have three choices; Delete, Pin, and Clear All. Delete which when clicked will delete that item. Pin which will make that item always available even after restarting your computer. The last is Clear All which will delete all of the copied items.
Clipboard history is a big deal in my world as I have to go back and forth all the time putting in something from earlier in the day. It makes my workflow much easier and hopefully yours too.