Excel – “Paste special” stopped working properly in Excel 2007

Some other app is likely monitoring the clipboard (such as my own ClipMate) for updates. Since the clipboard is a shared resource, any app that touches the clipboard needs to be careful about expecting it to be available, immediately after updating it. For example, if an app modifies the clipboard, and then tries to open it again right away, it should be prepared to deal with the scenario where other apps have opened it for inspection/pasting.

Excel has historically been bad about that. 15 years ago, the error would have said "out of memory", but it's really the same thing. The programmers did not anticipate that anything would go wrong, so they throw up a generic error and quit, rather than devise a defensive catch-and-retry strategy. Oh well.

Anyway, my advice for the end-user is to press ESCape to un-highlight any cell after copying. That will relive Excel of its obsession of clearing the clipboard, so it shouldn't even try to clear the clipboard when you drag it around.

It sounds to me like you're trying to cut/copy and paste between two different instances of Excel (ie, you've opened Excel multiple times rather than opening new workbooks within the program).

You can only preserve formatting and have all the Paste Special options available when you're working between two workbooks in the same Excel instance.

Useful additions by new users:

02.04.2012 LM - Try removing the software Skype Click-to-Call. I've read that it causes problems for excel 2007 and 2010. I did this on my computer and it instantly worked after.

2012-04-03, smitil: I had the same experience, i.e. when trying to Cut in Excel it worked like Copy (did not delete the initial data). I confirm that I removed the Skype Click-to-Call and instantly fixed the problem.

01-04-2013 - Jim: I'm on Mac OS 10.8.3 and had the same issue. Uninstalled Skype and my keyboard shortcuts to copy, cut and paste came right back.