Forum Discussion
Copy/paste no longer working in Excel
- I’d recommend that everyone having thus issue goes to File > Feedback and send a frown, putting your details in the section and start it [Can’t Copy Paste]
Also what version is everyone in who’s having this problem ? File > Account
It will read something like
Semi Annual Channel
Build 1234.567
Hi Jan, none of the methods work.
Below is a sample of my freshly formatted PC and freshly installed Microsoft Office 2016.
What I did was:
1) Select the A cell and press Ctrl+C
2) Select the B cell and press Ctrl+C
3) Select the C cell and press Ctrl+C
As you can see, there is this bracket ( somehow automatically copied on top of the A/B/C selections. This is really weird..
I'm on the same boat as jervis. every time I do Ctrl+C, the Ctrl+V result is always opening parentheses "(". The funny thing is that it also happened on LibreOffice Calc. So I suspect it's not MS Excel problem.
Clearing the Clipboard content sometimes helped, but not all the time.
Any clue?
- In that case I am out of ideas I'm afraid!
I have had the same problem, complicated by the "excel not responding" issue.
In an effort to solve that problem, I changed some settings under options.
Well, then my large workbook quit behaving nice. I would copy a row to one or more rows and all I got was the results from the copy reappearing in the new rows.
Well, that was cured with switching the calculations from manual to automatic. Fixed the copy paste problem! Did I feel dumb? You bet. I faintly remember using the manual calculation on a large worksheet from 20 years ago...
Now onto the "excel not responding" issue. I've been trying to dump tons of formatting (color, borders, etc.) and checking for those stray columns/rows that had accidental formatting. I saw that in one of my searches on google. It seems to help, except in the process, the message comes up again and sometimes doesn't clear for hours, even overnight. It's hard to dump formatting if you can't access the file and save your changes. I have been dealing with recovered files, multiple saves and so on. Sigh... I may have to start over with these files and recreate them. They are great grade calculators, with a sheet for each area (homework, attendance, quizzes, etc.) and pull into a summary page for final results. Lots of "vlookup" action between sheets. The fancy formatting with colors, borders, boxes helped to avoid errors with data entry. I teach large classes (100+) and this has evolved with each graduate assistant, computer, software change over the past 15 years. Probably quite a patchwork job by now. I might be on the road to sanity if all of this works.
I hope the manual to automatic switch in calculations works for you. Good luck. - Marie
Marie DawsonYour solution to the Excel Copy issue worked on my Windows 7 Office 2010 Pro! But the instructions you stated was not quite right on this PC. You said that you changed the selection in Options/Formula/Workbook Calculations from 'Manual' to 'Automatic'. But my 2010 Excel already had 'Automatic' selected. There is a third selection here, and that is 'Automatic except for data tables'. I set it to that, and the Copy function now works! And by 'it works', I specifically mean that if you do a right click on any cell or selection of cells, and then select Copy, the dashes around the selection would go away with in 1-2 seconds, and the Copy would only be good when pasting pure data. And on one of my client's computers (running Windows 10 and Office 365 (Office 2016)), the Copy would not work at all - no data was copied or storable, and the dashes went away right away on the highlighted cells as well. The Copy and the Paste Special always worked when you used the Ctrl C method twice in a row, and this was before changing any of the Option settings. I will post again after I try this solution on my 2 clients that are having this problem now with Office 2016 on Windows 10.
Vincent (07-21-2020)
