The data on the Clipboard is damaged, so Microsoft Office Access can’t paste it.

6 Comments

This is a new one for me. One good thing working with Excel and Access is the Copy/Paste ease between them. I usually paste data from Excel to Access for these two reasons:

  1. Create tables in Access (for small tables)
  2. Paste Field names: either in a table or in the import specs form

When I am importing data of the web, usually they have field names and data types given that page, so it makes sense to import that table in Excel (using Import from Web option), and then copy the field names and directly paste them the import specs form in Access. However, I kept running in this error today, which MS acknowledged and provided a solution, caused due to a security patch.

I used a workaround to paste those field names: copy and paste the data in a text file, and the again copy and paste it in Excel.

Solution Update: Colleen provided one more MS KB number to fix this problem. So, there are two KB articles which acknowledge this problem:

KB967699: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967699

KB958437: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958437

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About the Author

A co-author of Data Science for Fundraising, an award winning keynote speaker, Ashutosh R. Nandeshwar is one of the few analytics professionals in the higher education industry who has developed analytical solutions for all stages of the student life cycle (from recruitment to giving). He enjoys speaking about the power of data, as well as ranting about data professionals who chase after “interesting” things. He earned his PhD/MS from West Virginia University and his BEng from Nagpur University, all in industrial engineering. Currently, he is leading the data science, reporting, and prospect development efforts at the University of Southern California.

  • Colleen says:
    May 26, 2009 at 5:41 pm

    Google KB958437 and KB967699 – both patches need to be removed before you can copy and paste from Excel to Access… Microsoft’s Security patches have caused this.

  • a7n9 says:
    May 27, 2009 at 7:51 am

    Thanks for that additional KB, Colleen.

  • Tony says:
    August 9, 2009 at 2:47 am

    I have neither of the patches listed above installed. Have Office 2007 SP2 and the paste error still appears. Any help appreciated.

    Cheers
    Tony

  • a7n9 says:
    August 10, 2009 at 7:47 am

    I’m sorry, Tony that the error persists. Sadly, as of now, I do not know any other solution to this problem.

  • doi says:
    November 27, 2009 at 5:58 pm

    wow! this really worked! I tried the workaround on the other sites saying to copy the file in excel and close it and say yes to the clipboard but that didnt work. This one pasted all the cells i needed for MS Access! I can’t uninstall the patches since this i dont have admin rights to this pc.
    Thanks for this tip!!!

  • Shavendra says:
    February 14, 2010 at 3:52 pm

    Tony, you can copy your fields on a notepad and then paste them to your desired table in
    Access. I also had a simlar issue, and I got it resolved in a similar fashion.

    Hope it helps.

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