Clipboard (computing)

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. It is most commonly a part of a GUI environment and is usually implemented as an anonymous, temporary data buffer, sometimes called the paste buffer, that can be accessed from most or all programs within the environment via defined programming interfaces. A typical application accesses clipboard functionality by mapping user input (keybindings, menu selections, etc.) to these interfaces.

Clipboard managers are applications that enable the user to manipulate the clipboard.

The semantics of the clipboard facility varies from one operating system to another, and can also vary between versions of the same system. They can sometimes be changed by different programs or by user preference. This can lead to user frustration when switching between environments with different clipboard semantics particularly as copy and paste operations often become embedded in the user's muscle memory or mental model.

Most environments support a single clipboard transaction. Each cut or copy overwrites the previous contents. Normally, paste operations copy the contents, leaving the contents available in the clipboard for further pasting operations.

Early implementations of the clipboard stored data as plain text without meta-information such as typeface, type style or color. More recent implementations support the multiple types of data, allowing complex data structures to be stored. These range from styled text formats such as RTF or HTML, through a variety of bitmap and vector image formats to complex data types like spreadsheets and database entries.

For example, cutting a range of cells in a spreadsheet and then pasting them into another sheet may preserve the underlying formulae and data, and may even translate intra-cell references, so that a "SUM(...)" calculation on a sub-range of the cells is converted to refer to the newly pasted copies of those cells.

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