Tech for Luddites

I don’t use Excel much anymore, but I used it fairly often back when I was a full-time employee. And the thing I found most frustrating about it was that copy and paste didn’t work the way every other Office program worked. Back then, if I copied a cell’s contents and then took any action other than immediately pasting it in another cell, it would be removed from the clipboard and I would have to copy it again.

However, thanks to David Ringstrom at AccountingWEB (serving an industry that spends a LOT of time with spreadsheets), I just learned that the latest update to Excel for Office 365 now includes what he terms “persistent clipboard.”

I tested it out myself, and I’m not sure that’s the term I’d use for it. What’s interesting about this new feature is that when you copy the cell, it doesn’t put a static version of the contents into the clipboard for you to paste. Instead, each time you paste again, it uses whatever the current contents of that cell is.

You can see this behavior in action in the video below. Note that I only used the Copy command (CTRL + C) after entering the initial text. After that, I only used the Paste command (CTRL + V).

If you just want to paste the value of the cell, you can do that from the Paste dropdown menu in the top ribbon.

When you want to stop the cell from being copied further, use the ESC key.

Do you use Excel a lot? Will this change help you? Let us know in the comments below!

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