Clearing the Clipboard in a Macro

Jerry knows that, in Excel, there are several clipboards available. He wonders, though, if there is a way to clear each of the clipboards in a macro.

There are actually four different clipboards that you can tap into in Excel. The simplest one is the actual Excel clipboard, which is active anytime you see the marching ants around a selected range of cells. This clipboard can be cleared by using this single code line:

Application.CutCopyMode = False

The second clipboard is the Windows clipboard, which can be cleared using the following code, which works in 32-bit Excel environments:

Public Declare Function OpenClipboard Lib "user32" (ByVal hwnd As Long) As Long
Public Declare Function EmptyClipboard Lib "user32" () As Long
Public Declare Function CloseClipboard Lib "user32" () As Long

Sub ClearClip()
    OpenClipboard (0&)
    EmptyClipboard
    CloseClipboard
End Sub

If you are using a 64-bit version of Excel (which means all Excel 2019 and Microsoft 365 versions), then you'll need to use code that is a bit different:

Declare PtrSafe Function OpenClipboard Lib "User32" (ByVal hwnd As LongPtr) As LongPtr
Declare PtrSafe Function EmptyClipboard Lib "User32" () As Long
Declare PtrSafe Function CloseClipboard Lib "User32" () As Long

Sub ClearClip()
    OpenClipboard (0&)
    EmptyClipboard
    CloseClipboard
End Sub

The difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions is the declaration lines, all of which are outside of the actual ClearClip subroutine.

The third and fourth clipboards are the Windows Clipboard History and the Office Clipboard, which are obviously Windows-level clipboards. Accessing them is more nitty-gritty and advanced than anything discussed so far. Of course, you may not care about clearing these Windows clipboards in Excel. Rather than explain it all here, you may appreciate this discussion at Stack Overflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64066265/clearing-the-clipboard-in-office-365

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (12854) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365.