A clipboard manager is an insanely useful bit of productivity kit. It’s one of those things that you may not know even exists, but once you start using it, you can never go back.
A quick reminder: the clipboard is the bit of memory on your computer (or phone, tablet, fridge etc) where the content you have just copied or cut from the screen is store, so that you can paste it elsewhere.
One of the drawbacks of the clapboard is that it can only store one bit of content at a time – it overwrites itself every time you cut or copy something new.
However, with a clipboard manager, your history of cut and copied content is available to you whenever you want it – so you’re no longer limited to that one clipping!
Here’s an example of when this is handy. Say you’re copying lots of bits of text from one document to another. Normally, you’d copy a chunk, flip to the other document and paste it in; then back to the original, copy, flip, paste, and back again.
With a clipboard manager in place, you just copy all the different chunks in the original, then flip to the destination document and paste them all in.
It’s so easy! You’ll wonder how you ever coped without it.
I use Alfred on my Mac to manage my clipboard (it does a load of other neat stuff too). If you’re on Windows, Ditto seems like a good option.