You’re not using your Windows PC’s clipboard to its full potential

Copy-and-paste is one of those basic PC skills we all use without much thought. You press Ctrl + C to copy something, then Ctrl + V to paste it, right? But if you copy a second item before pasting the first, the old item seems to vanish. Now what?

Windows has a better clipboard hidden behind a different shortcut. Press Win + V to open your clipboard history. The first time you use it, Windows will ask you to turn the feature on. From then on, it will keep a list of the text, links, and images you copy.

Press Win + V whenever you want to view that list. Click any item to paste it into whatever you’re currently working on. This saves you from jumping back and forth between windows to copy each item again. I find it most helpful when moving several links, notes, or bits of research into one document.

You can also pin items that you use often. Open the clipboard, click the three-dot menu beside an item, and choose Pin. Pinned items stay in your history after you restart your PC, which makes this useful for email templates, addresses, and text you reuse each day.

If you use more than one Windows PC, go to Settings > System > Clipboard to sync copied text across your devices. Just take care with passwords and private data. Clipboard history stores what you copy, so use Clear all when you want to wipe the list.

Win + V takes very little effort to learn, and it makes one of Windows’ most common tasks much less of a hassle.

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