We all come across a situation where we copy text and then without pasting it, copy another text. Yikes! The previously copied text in the clipboard is lost. Sometimes this can be really irritating as finding the text which was copied earlier eats up important time. And it might be possible that you don’t even find that crucial text later. For this problem, we share an easy but an obscure feature of Microsoft Word which can help you to retrieve or recover clipboard history in Windows from now.
Clipboard is a container which stores the data you cut/copy which includes text or images. The important thing to note here is that data storage in the clipboard is temporary. Here is what Wikipedia says about Clipboard.
The clipboard is a software facility used for short-term data storage and/or data transfer between documents or applications, via copy and paste operations.
Clipboard is really handy to transfer data between applications. But it replaces the previous data when a new one is copied or cut. Recently, I found out a life saver feature of Word which keeps the history of the data copied to clipboard on Windows.
Let’s have a look at it.
Recover Previously Copied Data in Clipboard
This feature won’t be able to retrieve data you have already lost from the clipboard if you haven’t opened Word while you were doing copy/cut operations.
But in future, use this feature to make sure you can recover previously clipboard data while doing copy/paste.
Launch Microsoft Word if not opened already. Make sure Home tab is selected. In Home tab, you should see Cut, Copy, paste options just below the Home tab option. Below copy/paste options there will be a Clipboard text with a diagonal downward pointing arrow icon next to it. Click on that icon.
Woohoo! Keep Word opened while performing copy/cut and all the data you copy or cut will appear in the window that pops out. The history limit is 24 which I think is good enough.
Right click on the desired text or picture and select Paste to recover previously copied data from the clipboard. If you wish you can also delete the clipboard history from the same context menu.
We hope that this feature of Word helped you to retrieve or recover clipboard history on Windows. If you think the article contains valuable information then please share it with a colleague today!
Mendiratta, Hemant. “How to Recover Clipboard History in Windows with Microsoft Word” Techuntold, April 29, 2017