If you need to know what is inside your Windows clipboard before you decide to overwrite it with something else or start pasting it into document. Instead of viewing the content by opening up notepad or word document and paste it, there is a quick way that enables you to know the clipboard content with just a simple click.
To display the current clipboard content, you can run clipbrd.exe. Clipbrd.exe comes with Windows XP and is located in C:WINDOWSsystem32. In order to access this utility quickly, you can create a desktop shortcut as follows.
- Create a new shortcut on our desktop (or other convenient location).
- In the ‘Create Shortcut window’ type: %windir%System32clipbrd.exe and click Nex.
- Name it as you like (default is clipbrd.exe) then click Finish.
Just double click this shortcut and it will display the clipboard content.
What about Vista and Windows 7?
Microsoft didn’t include clipbrd.exe in Vista or Windows 7. However, you could copy clipbrd.exe from windows XP into C:WindowsSystem32 in Vista or Windows 7, then create a shortcut on desktop to access it directly.
Sometimes clipbrd.exe doesn’t work with Vista or Windows 7 & you may receive a message like, “Entry Point Not Found.” You may try to run it in XP/SP2 compatibility mode. Or you could use this FREE clipboard viewer from Karen’s Power Tools, Clipboard Viewer.
If you want a more advanced tool to Manage your Windows Clipboard, you could use the FREE tool, ClipMagic, which is a powerful Clipboard Extender and Information Manager for storing Images and Text, either automatically or manually in a categorized format, with details of the URL if the text is from an Internet site. It lets you edit, merge and manage your clips.