Being able to paste only the most recent snippet you’ve copied into your clipboard seems so old school. Now Chromebook folk can enjoy Clipboard Manager and have a buffer of the five most recent items you copied. Here’s how…
ChromeOS doesn’t get much news coverage, but the Google team that’s responsible for its development never sleeps and there are new features and updates added on almost a weekly basis. The latest slick addition is Clipboard Manager, which adds a great feature to ChromeOS: The ability to have access to the last five items you copied, not just the most recent. This might not seem like much, but once you start using it, you’ll find it’s tremendously helpful.
To gain access to this addition, you’ll need to update your Chromebook to the latest version of ChromeOS, v119.0. Then on your keyboard locate the magnifying lens key. It looks like this:
The key sequence you’ll be using is 🔍 + V but we’ll get to that. First off, let’s jump over to Wikipedia and add a few things to the copy/paste buffer (and thereby Clipboard Manager)…
ADD TO THE CHROMEOS CLIPBOARD
Adding to the Clipboard hasn’t changed: Ctrl+C copies any content desired, from text to images. Not only that, but it copies all of its formatting – including links – as you’ll see momentarily. To grab this snippet from Wikipedia, for example, I click and drag to select it, then Ctrl+C to copy it:
There’s no indication that it’s succeeded, so we’ll have to trust it worked. Grab some additional text content if you’d like. Now let’s grab something more interesting too by moving the cursor over a word that produces a pop-up:
Grab a screen capture with Ctrl+ScreenCapture (on Chromebooks the latter key looks more like two rectangles stacked atop each other. It’ll be found on your function key row) and the image is both saved to disk and copied into the clipboard. Now let’s see what we can do with Clipboard Manager!
USING CLIPBOARD MANAGER IN GOOGLE DOCS
I’m going to open up a new Google Doc and use the traditional Ctrl-V paste. It pastes the most recent addition to the clipboard, the screen capture:
Move just past the image in the doc and this time use the key sequence 🔍 + V. Instead of content just appearing, the Clipboard Manager window appears:
You can see there are two images, then two text snippets, then an image. The text is shown unformatted, but choosing the second snippet reveals that it’s retained its formatting and links:
Success! Well, unless you didn’t want all that formatting.
REMOVE TEXT FORMATTING IN GOOGLE DOCS
If you want to just remove a link, click on the link in Docs to reveal the tiny link toolbar and preview window:
You can see that there are three options: Copy link (the two rectangles), edit link (the pencil) and remove link (the chain link with the line through it). That’s one solution.
If you want to remove all links and all formatting simultaneously, however, the pro tip is to use clipboard itself! Simply select all the text you want to unformat, use Ctrl+C to copy it, then use Edit > Paste without formatting to produce a clean copy:
The keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl+Shift+V. Unfortunately, 🔍 + Shift + V doesn’t work, but I’m guessing that in a future ChromeOS update that feature will just appear as an improvement to Clipboard Manager.
The result:
That should get you started with the Clipboard Manager. A very helpful addition to Chrome OS!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about ChromeOS since it was introduced and have accumulated a LOT of helpful tutorials. Please check out my ChromeOS Help Area while you’re visiting. Thanks!
Informative article Dave. My challenge is that on my two active keyboards (Microsoft and Dell) I cannot either a “magnifying glass” or the “two rectangle.” The keyboards are likely 10 yrs old.