Comments on: Clipboard.Clear … oops

By: tim

tim — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:30:24 +0000

incidentally was it Word or Live Writer?

It was Live Writer to Word. Maybe the copy failed, of course.

Tim

By: Alex Atkin UK

Alex Atkin UK — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:22:04 +0000

I think this begs the question, if Word is doing this and he knows it does this – why did he not find an alternative for saving temporary work? Open Office while not having everything Word does would make a good enough alternative for simple spell check and formatting blog posts.

It begs another question, does WordPress not have the ability to save a post but not publish it yet? Surely it does, and if so why didn’t he just download the post when he got home rather than deleting it?

Quite frankly, Bob Warfield was in a hurry to leave and made a mistake, something we have all done. In that situation you normally would copy, paste it into Word, Save, THEN delete the source. I am sure he normally would take such precautions too, its common sense.

I mean yes, if Word is doing this Microsoft were partly to blame here. But nobody is forcing you to use Word for this purpose. If it doesn’t work properly, find something that does. If this is something it has done for years you can only blame yourself for a lapse of judgement. It was Microsofts fault the first time you did it, after that its on your own head.

By: Grant

Grant — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:15:16 +0000

I agree it’s careless to delete something before pasting it, but users come to expect a certain experience in applications. Not every app conforms, but basic good design suggests menus / toolbars at the top, status bars at the bottom, close button in the upper-left, and NO CLEARING THE CLIPBOARD upon opening! lol

I bet it’s a bug. For me, Word always clears the clipboard upon opening. This is particularly annoying when I hit “Print Screen” to take a screen shot and then open a technical document in Word to paste it. Excel also clears the clipboard. It doesn’t seem to happen if I already have one document open and then open a second document to paste into – only if Word or Excel were completely closed.

Yes, it’s easy to clear the clipboard in code (Clipboard.Clear() is all it takes in C#) but why would an app do that, unless it is a bug?

By: Andy Parkes

Andy Parkes — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:40:56 +0000

I can understand his frustration but you can’t really blame the OS or even the application here (incidentally was it Word or Live Writer? It changed half way through the post)

There are utils that allow you to keep multiple clipboard entries

Clip collector is one of them

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=973e928c-19e2-4bd0-a292-817674273d4b&bt=1&pl=1

By: George

George — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:24 +0000

In this case the “bad user experience” was due to his own stupidity. Who would delete something before it had been pasted (and saved) in _any_ OS?

Its like handing over your car before the cheque has cleared and then blaming the bank when it bounces.

By: Niels Muller Larsen

Niels Muller Larsen — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:44:04 +0000

We are four it lecturers sharing an office. Whenever a problem like that arises I always say: “There’s medicine against that”.
But then again I am the only non-Windows-user of the four
The medicine, well in the old days every IBM’er had a “Think” on the wall or on his desk.