Copy/paste no longer working in Excel

I was having the same issue and found the below fix that worked for me, 2nd post from Gary McMaster.

https://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/448364-lost-right-click-cut-copy-paste.html

I've had similar issues in the desktop version of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010.  I first noticed that Excel would not drag-and-drop from cell to cell. I couldn't paste in, any capacity, within a workbook either. However, I could copy from Excel and Paste to another program(BluBeam/Adobe), just not another Office program. Which lead me to discover the problem existed across all the Office programs I had open.

I closed ALL Microsoft Office programs and re-opened them and the copy-paste functionality returned for all of them.

I hope they can fix this but in the mean time this was my work around:

1.  Make Clipboard visible under Home tab

2.  Highlight what you would like to copy / paste and you will see it show up in clipboard

3.  Select the cell where you want the info to be pasted on 

4.  don't press Ctrl+V, instead press the actual item on the clipboard menu and the items will be pasted on the selected cell. Note: it will be pasted without formats. 

Again if someone else can figure out this issue that would be great, but in the mean time these steps have worked every time. 

Thanks

I was having the same issue as the original post, although after reading the thread I realized I had also lost the ability to drag down from two cells containing 1 and 2 respectively and have Excel complete a series: instead, all the cells in the range now had 1...

Copy&paste didn't work in just one specific workbook, let's call it the "failing workbook". I had a few more open at the same time: copy/paste worked fine in all the others. I could even copy in the failing workbook and paste correctly in another one. It was only in the failing workbook that if I selected a cell (or a range of cells), copied them, and as soon as I clicked on a new cell the dashed lines would disapear and there was nothing left to paste.

Same as the original post, I was able to copy and paste the text content from one cell to another.

I am an occasional Excel user: the only thing that was different between the failing workbook and the rest of them is that it contained macros. I don't fully understand the code, I copied it from a googled example and adapted it to my particular needs. The macros I copied count the number of coloured cells in a range. 

While writing this reply I tried duplicating the file and removing the macro module on the copy.

Copy&paste worked immediately after. 

After this I looked into the macros and saw that I had pasted the following code in the ThisWorkbook option:

Option Explicit

'
' http://www.myonlinetraininghub.com/count-sum-and-average-colored-cells
'

Private Sub Workbook_SheetSelectionChange(ByVal Sh As Object, ByVal Target As Range)

    'Uncomment the next line if you want to make Excel recalculate the ActiveSheet every time the Selection changes
    ActiveSheet.Calculate
    
End Sub

So I did comment back the ActiveSheet.Calculate line, and copy&paste worked once again !!

Maybe for folks who are having the issue in any workbook, the problem could be triggered by having a start macro with some command such as the line I showed...

The dragging issue must be another problem because it seemed to happen in all my workbooks, not only in the failing one. However after closing Excel and reopening just the failing workbook, dragging 1,2 to get a series was once again working, both in the failing workbook and in another fresh one I opened. 

I could not get it to fail again...

I hope this helps somebody at Microsoft look into both issues...

Add me to the list. Some copy/paste function work,some do not. This started recently.  Specifically I was trying to copy formulas from a range of cells to paste into another range. Some cells had formulas, others only had values. When attempting to 'paste formulas', Excel would only perform a basic 'paste' of all the data in the copy-from range, thus overwriting the values in the target range.  I tested with different files on three separate machines. One desktop and one tablet both running Office 365 desktop versions of Excel 2016, and one other desktop running Excel 2010.  Same problem in all.  Their are two common denominators: All three systems are running windows 10 (two running Pro, one running Home), and all the files tested were last modified using Excel 2016. I've tried all the solutions posted here so far - no joy. I did the feedback to MS are requested. Surely hope this get a solution quickly. Productivity is being killed!!

This problem is just because you have 2 instances of EXCEL.EXE and you want to copy paste from one instance to another. You can't copy paste values for example. You can see that from your Start Task Manager. In excel 2010 any workbook opened from explorer was opened from the last application opened. In 365 they try but from my experience sometimes fails to open all of them in only one application.

A solution is to open that excel file using File->Open commands inside your application and not double-clicking an excel file from explorer. I hope this helps.

I have had this same issue in all Microsoft Office products, and I just had the same issue happen in OpenOffice Draw! It seems to happen with a document that I have been editing over and over again. Opening a new document does not seem to help the issue.