Have you ever really thought about how many times a day you copy and paste stuff? You probably do it more than you think and it’s so routine that you don’t even notice. That is, until you try to paste an email address and realize you have a YouTube link on your clipboard. I’ve always thought it was stupid that all of the major OS’s only let you copy and paste one thing at a time and I’m surprised that they haven’t introduced a better system as a standard feature.
Clipboard managers like Ditto add useful copy and paste features that are not available by default in most OS’s.
Fortunately, there are a bunch of free clipboard managers that take copy and paste to the next level. If you don’t use a clipboard manager, or don’t know what they are, I’m not talking about some kind of complicated geeky software that requires a manual. Essentially, they all just do one thing; they let you copy multiple items to your clipboard and paste them whenever you want.
With a clipboard manager, I can copy a folder, a Word document, an email address from a website, and some cells from an excel document without stopping to paste each one before copying another. When I want to paste something, instead of pressing ctrl+v, I press ctrl+shift+v and a little box pops up with everything I’ve copied recently and I can double click to paste whatever I want.
Because most clipboard managers just serve one function, they tend to be really good at it and they come with a lot of handy settings that can be easily configured. I use Ditto, a free clipboard manager for windows, but there are plenty of options available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. I wouldn’t argue that Ditto is the best one; it’s kind of just the first one I stumbled across. One of my coworkers uses ClipX and speaks highly of it. There are a bunch of sites that compare and review all of the free clipboard managers, so I’ll leave that to someone else but I would encourage anyone who isn’t using one to try it out. Chances are, you’ll wonder what you ever did without one.