You can go ahead and close this window now, once you’ve enabled Clipboard History. Note that you can also disable automatic syncing on this particular device, so you could have work -> home machine, but prevent home -> work system if you prefer.
While you’re here, you can turn on Sync across devices too, if you’re curious, and it’ll offer a bit more control:īy default, this syncs your clipboard content across PCs, which means that you could have the weird situation where you Copy something while on your work computer, then Paste it on your home Windows tablet or 2-in-1. Go ahead and click on the toggle to turn it ON. Turns out you can enable or disable the Sync across devices clipboard if you want and you can clear your clipboard data if you want, but let’s focus our attention on the very first section: “ Clipboard history“. Click or tap to open up this window and you’ll see:
To get to it easily, just search in the TaskBar for ‘clipboard’:Īs shown, you’re looking for “ Clipboard settings” in System Settings.
So let’s have a look at how to enable it and use it... HOW TO ENABLE WINDOWS 10 CLIPBOARD HISTORYĪs with every other feature of Windows, it turns out that there’s a control panel just for the clipboard. Good news! Windows 10 now offers a built-in clipboard history that can remember up to 50 items you’ve copied into your clipboard, in order, and lets you easily paste any of the historical entries. There are third-party apps that offer this capability, but what if you just want to enable it and have it be part of the core Windows OS itself? Top among them is confusion between pasting “with styles” versus a plain content-only paste, and clipboard history. Of course, copy & paste has been a mainstay of computer interaction for decades and was invented by Larry Tesler of Xerox PARC way back in the 1970s.Īnyway, for an idea that’s been around for over fifty years, it’s surprising how it’s still mostly dogged by some fundamental design mistakes too, and doubly so given the extraordinary speed, storage, and capabilities of even our modern watches and phones. Until it’s not, and you wonder what happened to the content you already had loaded into your clipboard before an inadvertent Edit > Copy changed it without you realizing.
Heck, nowadays you can copy from one device and find that content in the clipboard paste buffer on another, which can be extraordinarily handy. One of the unsung heroes of modern computing is the ability to copy and paste content from one window to another, or even from one app to another.