It’s only recently that I have begun to realise the full potential of the Windows clipboard. Normally I copy and paste text all the time and never give the actual clipboard a second thought. But after reading Lifehacker’s Top 10 Clipboard Tricks, I now realise there is more to it than just pressing CTRL + C.

Recently I found a nice little freeware program called ClipX. It’s described as a “Clipboard History Manager” and it is proving to be insanely useful. It basically remembers all the text and images that you have copied and pasted to the clipboard and you can retrieve any of it at any time by clicking on the relevant entry.

The actual program sits in your task bar close to your PC clock (the paperclip icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screenshot above). By clicking on the icon once, a box pops up with your recent clipboard entries. Choose the one you need by clicking on it and you can then CTRL + V it into another document.

The program developer has even written a bunch of useful plug-ins to enhance ClipX. Check the homepage for more details.

The program remembers up to 1024 previous clipboard entries (you can choose how many you want it to remember) and you can set ClipX to purge itself when you shut down your PC. If that isn’t enough, the program also has a built-in search function to look for a particular clipboard entry.

If you are a big clipboard user, this is a program to consider installing. But if you would prefer to have a choice, another similar program is Ditto. This one claims to be able to synchronize multiple clipboards.

Do you have any other preferred clipboard manager programs?