Secrets of the Office Masters: Replacing the Office Clipboard

Conventional wisdom says Microsoft always gets it right on the third try. If that's true, it's going to take one more try before the Office Clipboard is ready for prime time. The first version, introduced in Office 2000, was so infuriatingly unusable that most sensible Office users made disabling it their top priority. Office XP's Clipboard is better, but still suffers from too many limitations to be truly useful.

If you really want to put some power in the Windows Clipboard, we recommend replacing it with a third-party utility. Search any well-stocked shareware site and you'll find dozens of candidates. Our favorite is the $20 ClipCache Plus, from XRayz Software (http://www.xrayz.co.uk). It includes these worthy improvements over the less-capable Office Clipboard:

• Unlike the Office Clipboard, this utility works with any Windows program.

• You can save favorite clips for reuse later—when filling in forms, for example. With the Office Clipboard, your saved clips stay in memory only as long as you have an Office program open, and you can't save the list.

• ClipCache Plus can save hundreds or even thousands of clips, instead of the arbitrary limit of 24 that Office imposes.

• You can assign keyboard shortcuts to any saved clip and use it in any program, not just Office.

• This utility enables you to clean up clips—removing e-mail forwarding indicators, for instance, or converting the case of text in a clip.