How to turn off the Office Clipboard (2000, XP, 2003)
Sep 11th, 2007 by Chris Thornton
Microsoft Office has a clipboard history window, which can be bothersome, or if you are working with a clipboard extender such as ClipMate, can interfere with normal operation. It’s not always intuitive how to close it, so we’ve collected and summarized information here.
Office 2007:
- Doesn’t seem to be a problem. I haven’t seen a clipboard come up, when performing multiple copies.
Office 2003: See these articles:
Office2000:
- From Microsoft: “As you copy items, the Office Clipboard automatically appears on your desktop. You can close it if you do not want it to appear automatically. After closing the toolbar three times, you are prompted to permanently close it. If you permanently close the clipboard, to redisplay it, on the View menu, click Toolbars and then click Clipboard.”
- This information is from the Microsoft Support Knowledge Base, Article: Q221190 : Using the Office 2000 Clipboard
There is yet another way, if you want to edit the registry. The information is in a related Knowledge Base article: Q207438 OFF2000: Preventing the Office Clipboard Toolbar from Appearing - Here are two registry scripts that will turn off, or on, the Office2000 clipboard by adjusting the value that is mentioned in the above MS Knowledge Base article:
Turning it off: office2000clipboardoff.reg
And back on again:office2000clipboardon.reg
Just click on either of the above links above, download and run the file to update the registry. You’ll be prompted with an “are you sure” dialog, and then the registry is updated. If you want to see what they’re doing first, just download to your hard disk and open with a text editor such as Notepad. -
Note: This registry patch won’t work in Office XP
OfficeXP Clipboard:
-
OfficeXP has a clipboard that will interfere with certain ClipMate operations like PowrePaste. Disabling it is easy. Start WinWord, and you’ll see the “task pane” at the side of the screen. Within the task pane, you’ll see the clipboard appear if you copy two items in a row. Now you can turn it off for good. Select the “Options” menu, and turn off the “Show Automatically” and “Collect without showing” options. There is a screenshot to show this. When you re-start WinWord, the clipboard won’t re-appear. If you need to bring it back, you can do so via the menu at the top of the “task pane”.
- Alternately, if you see the OfficeXP clipboard icon showing in the Windows System Tray (next to the clock), you can right-click on it and select “stop collecting”.
Related Links:
- Annoyances.Org has a page on disabling the Office Clipboard in both Office2000 and XP.
This worked for me to Permantely turn off the clipboard in Microsoft Office for 2003 running Windows XP
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By Bill Detwiler
Close all Office applications, including Outlook, before performing any of the following registry edits.
To Disable clipboard:
1. Click Start | Run
2. Enter “regedit” in the Open field
3. Click OK
In the Regedit window:
1. Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\[version]\Common\General
Where [version] corresponds to your Office version: 9.0 = Office 2000, 10.0 = Office XP, and 11.0 = Office 2003.
2. Locate the DWORD value AcbControl or create the value if it does not exist.
3. Set the AcbControl value to 1. (Set the value to 0 to enable the dialog box.)
4. Close the Registry Editor and restart an Office application.
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To Meredith Sivick
THANK YOU 🙂
Nothing else I did was working. I had clicked off that stupid checkmark next to Automatically Open Clipboard at least a dozen times. I had clicked off every other checkmark I could find. Every time I went into Excel and copied a couple of times the @#*& Clipboard would open up AGAIN. It looks like you’ve found a way to get the job done. I just wish Microsoft Office would have honored my first attempts to turn off the clipboard. It shouldn’t be that hard.
Sorry for re-opening this old topic, but is there a registry key I can create/change to just stop the pop-up asking to save the clipboard on exit?