A very early look at the Cloud Clipboard experience in Windows 10

Microsoft released a new Insider Build of the upcoming Windows 10 version 1809 to the Insider Channel yesterday. The new build included several new and improved features such as Sets improvements, a dark theme for File Explorer, integration of search previews in the search functionality, and a new Clipboard experience.

The Clipboard is as basic as it gets on Windows right now. You can copy text or images to it and paste the content again at a later point in time. The main limitations of the current Clipboard functionality is that you can store a single item only in the Clipboard.

Windows users who needed better functionality could use any of the gazillion clipboard managers that third-party developers created for the operating system. We reviewed our fair share of them; to name a few: CopyQ, Clipboard Master, Clipboard Help+Spell, or Clipjump.

Cloud Clipboard in Windows 10

While there is no guarantee that the new clipboard experience will land in Windows 10 version 1809 released later this year, its current iteration is integrated in the build that will become the new version eventually.

Microsoft addresses the main limitation of the Windows Clipboard with the update. Instead of supporting a single storage slot, the new Clipboard keeps a record of the copy history.

Windows 10 users may use the new keyboard shortcut Windows-V to display the clipboard history on the screen to pick any item that was copied to the Clipboard previously.

The interface is not the most elegant of interfaces right now but work may continue to make it more usable. It does display images if you copied them to the Clipboard, however.

You can pin an item to the top to access it quickly; the option to pin an item is quite useful if you find yourself pasting text or an image throughout the day regularly (e.g. your email address, an email signature, phone number..).

The new Clipboard syncs data across all connected devices. Syncing can be useful if you work on different Windows PCs that support the new feature but some users may dislike it as it may push important data to the cloud.

Windows users and administrators may use the Settings application to control the behavior. Those who don't require synchronization can turn it off, and if you don't require the storing of multiple items, then you can disable the feature as well.

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You find the new options when you use Windows-I to open the Settings application and go to System > Clipboard.

• Save multiple items -- a simple toggle to allow or disable the feature.
• Sync across devices -- can be set to on or off. You may also set sync to manual to get an option to sync individual items from the Clipboard History across devices.
• Clear Clipboard data -- use this to erase all stored data.

Microsoft's implementation has the following limitations currently:

• Clipboard history supports plain text, HTML or image content with a size of less than 1 Megabyte each.
• Text synchronization is only supported for content less than 100 Kilobytes.

Closing Words

Third-party clipboard tools that extend the Clipboard are popular applications on Windows and it seems likely that Microsoft will please part of the userbase with the improved Clipboard that it plans to integrate in Windows 10 natively. Development on the feature will continue and it is too early to tell how useful it will be in the end.