Soon after Windows 10 was released Microsoft made a very useful upgrade to the Clipboard via a new tool called Clipboard History.
In days of old the Windows Clipboard was limited to storing just one item at a time: the last item you either ‘copied’ or ‘cut’.
That was a pretty severe limitation since whatever was currently stored in the Clipboard was wiped out and overwritten the next time you copied or cut another item.
Clipboard History changed that by allowing the Clipboard to store up to the last 25 items that you either copied or cut. You can then choose among them when you needed to ‘paste’ something that’s stored there.
Clipboard History is also included with Windows 11, but as with Windows 10 it’s disabled by default.
Luckily, it’s very easy to enable the Clipboard History feature in Windows 11. In fact, there are two ways to do it…
Enable Clipboard History via the ‘Settings’ app:
1 – Right-click the Start button, then click Settings.
2 – Make sure the “System” tab is active, them click Clipboard in the right-hand pane.
3 – Toggle the “Clipboard history” setting to On.
Enable Clipboard History via the ‘Emoji Panel’:
1 – Press the Windows+V key combination.
2 – Click the Turn on button.
That’s all there is to enabling Clipboard History on your Windows 11 PC. Now, let’s take a look at how you use it.
Using Clipboard History to paste a stored item into a document or text input box is almost as easy as pasting something the old fashioned way.
Even though Clipboard History is now enabled you can still paste something from the Clipboard by either pressing the Ctrl+V key combination or clicking Edit>Paste, but those methods will simply paste the last item that was copied or cut just like it always has.
However, press Windows+V and you’ll see a box pop up with all the stored items listed there with the item that was copied or cut last at the top.
Simply click on the item on want to paste and Windows will paste that item at the current cursor position. Pretty cool, right?
Just as with the regular Clipboard, all the items stored in Clipboard History will be erased when you shut down the PC. You can also erase them immediately by clicking the Clear all button.
But luckily there’s a way to “save” items that you know you’ll need to paste again in the future.
Press the Windows+V key again and take a closer look at the stored items.
See the little “push-pin” on the right side of each stored item? If you click on one of those push-pins that will “pin” that item to the Clipboard to prevent it from being erased when you either click the Clear all button or shut down the computer.
As you can see, the Clipboard History feature greatly improves on the original Windows Clipboard. I hope you find it just as useful as I do.