Clearing Large Clipboard Entries

by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 3, 2011)

Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Clearing Large Clipboard Entries.

Have you ever noticed that after you've copied a large amount of data to the Clipboard, and then you close Excel, you see a dialog box stating that "A large amount of data is present in the Clipboard. Do you want to save it before quitting?" You may get tired of seeing this message. If so, then there are a couple of things you can do.

First, you can replace the "large amount" with a "small amount." (Excel never asks if you want to discard a small amount.) To do this, just select a single cell in your worksheet and copy it to the Clipboard. The contents of the single cell replace the large amount of data on the Clipboard, and you can exit Excel without seeing the message.

If you'd rather have a macro approach, you can do the exact same thing in a macro—just select cell A1 and have your macro copy it to the Clipboard:

Sub GoAway1()
    ActiveSheet.Range("A1").Copy
End Sub

Another approach is to use a single-line macro that basically "disables" the Clipboard by canceling any current copy operation:

Sub GoAway2()
    Application.CutCopyMode = False
End Sub

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