Whenever you copy a cell or a range of cells in Excel (my version is 2010 on Windows 7), and then do something else like insert new sheet row or simply edit another cell, Excel removes the clipboard data. For me this seems to me so utterly stupid and it's very frustrating (probably it has some logic behind it like preserving references or something like that, but I don't think it would be rocket science to make it work like any other program that has Copy-Paste available).
The only workaround is to use the Office clipboard, but I don't want to (uses space on the screen and it's a lot less comfortable than CTRL+V) and I don't think I should be forced to use it.
Here's a reference to some posts also complaining about this problem:
How to make Excel retain the contents of its clipboard
Excel 2010 removes data from clipboard, how can I stop it?
Is there any way I can force Excel to keep my data into the clipboard until I decide I don't need it no more instead of it, without using the annoying (to me) Office clipboard? Maybe using the Windows clipboard.
Or at least you could explain to me why this is happening (I know this is normal behavior, but why?)
The answer, unfortunately, is no, you can't stop this from happening.
As described by Joel Spolsky, developer and program manager for excel:
The official reason is that Excel doesn't really have cut and paste, it has move and copy. That's necessary because Excel automatically does reference fix up. For example, if cell A2 is defined as =A1, and you move cell A1 to A3, cell A2 will be updated to =A3.
If Excel actually cut things to the clipboard you would somehow need to have a reference pointing >into< the clipboard which is bizarre and for which there is no reasonable syntax. In other words, Excel doesn't want to leave you with dangling references during a move operation and isn't confident that it would be able to fix them up correctly when you completed the move by selecting "Paste."
Joel Spolsky 3/9/2004
What this means is that because of the difficulty inherent in the way excel maintains references, at the time of development there was no good way to store these references outside of excel and have them remain dynamic to be re-inserted. Once you change focus excel's ability to retain your original references is lost.
Unfortunately, MS does not consider this a bug.
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