How to Clear Clipboard in Windows 10

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How to Clear Clipboard in Windows 10

What is the clipboard?

Let’s suppose you’ve just copied a folder from a shared network drive and pasted it to wherever you needed to paste it. Now would be a good time to clear the clipboard.

The clipboard is where Windows stores what you’ve just copied.

Why is it a good idea to clear the clipboard?

Clearing the clipboard saves system resources and keeps your data secure, but for me, it’s more personal.

I have this bad case of OCD when working on a Windows machine. I would find myself constantly right-clicking and hitting Refresh. Only sometimes I’d hit Paste in accident and Windows would start moving whatever file or folder I had copied. It’s not pretty and canceling the copying and pasting on Windows always seems to take longer than necessary.

Back in the good old days of Windows 7, I used to be able to just press the Windows key, then type “clipbrd” and hit Enter to pull up the clipboard and empty it. For whatever reason, Microsoft decided to discontinue this in Windows 10, but luckily, the latest operating system from Microsoft still allows for the clipboard to be emptied. Here’s how.

How to clear the clipboard in Windows 10

Press Windows + R on the keyboard and type in the text below.

 cmd /c echo.|clip

Hit Enter and you’ll see the Command application quickly flashes on your screen. You’ve now successfully emptied the clipboard. Right-click on your desktop and you’ll see the “Paste” and “Paste shortcut” options are now grayed out.

Windows + R Command to Clear Clipboard

If you prefer the Command application, launch it and type in the command line below.

echo off | clip

Command Line to Clear Clipboard

Better still, you can save this command as a bat file and simply double click to run it when needed. It’ll do the same trick. Just type out the command in a new Text document and then save it with a “.bat” extension name and you are good to go.

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