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In Excel, every time I copy and paste, only the text is copying and the formatting is not being copied as shown in the figure below:

screenshot_1

There are no paste special options available while pasting.

In the figure above, I have copied cell A1 using CTRL+C and pasted in cell A3 using CTRL+V. Only the text is pasted and the formatting was not.

This is what I have tried without any luck:

  1. Repaired MS Office with LIVE CD.
  2. Checked the format cells.
  3. Tried by closing all instances of Excel.

Interestingly, when I went to paste special options as shown in the screenshot below, only Text and Unicode options were available.

screenshot_2

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  • 1
    Do you have any add-ins or anything like that? These could be causing this behaviour. Try opening Excel whilst holding down the Shift Key (to disable add-ins) to see if this makes any difference. Mar 16, 2012 at 11:17
  • Let me try. Intead I will uninstall add-ons
    – Vikram
    Mar 16, 2012 at 11:21
  • No Luck creamy. still the problem exists :-(
    – Vikram
    Mar 16, 2012 at 11:24
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    If you're copying from one Excel window to another then they're open in separate instances. If you opened excel twice from the start menu short cut this will happen. Open one file, open the second via the open dialog and try it again.
    – Jesse
    Mar 16, 2012 at 17:30

7 Answers 7

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First, try to run in safe mode : Excel.exe /Safe (in the run command) if that works correctly there, that means that it's due to either an add-in or a workbook that is loaded at startup.

(File>Options > Addins - uncheck all Addins) Note which ones were selected. Close Excel and then reopen it

If that works, then one of the addins was the issue, just have to find which one by reenabling them one by one.

If this didn't work, then it's probably due to one file located in the startup directory of excel. (ie C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\XLSTART for me)

Any file in there is loaded when you start Excel. Remove the files out of that folder and open Excel to see if the problem is gone.

if that works, add them back one at a time, closing and reopening Excel each time until you determine which file was corrupted.

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I had the same issue and removing (or put it on 'disable') the add-on 'Skype Click to Call' from Skype in the IE-browser under Internet Options and the tab 'Programs' - 'Manage add-ons', it was solved. Seems that the new Skype version is adding this 'add-on'.

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The same happens to one of my user. Excel settings are all the same as what other users have but he just can't do the paste special as usual. Found out that it's the IE add-ons that caused the issue as whenever he clicks on a link to open in IE, the Paste Special will stop working right.

So to recap:

  • Disable Bing bar add-ons
  • Disable Sype's Click to call addon
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I had the same problem. After reading these posts, I did one simple intervention that helped:

  • Went into Firefox prefs, disabled Skype Click To Call.

Presto: problem solved. Bizarre but true. Thanks to all above!

Same is also true for Chrome - right click on the Skype add-in and disable it.

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  • I don't even have the Skype Click to Call thing, but turning Skype for Business off did solve the problem. Thanks for posting!
    – dmvianna
    Sep 27, 2016 at 0:12
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Simple solution : File>Options>Add Ins> Manage (its placed below right)> Choose Actions from multi option menu > Click GO > Check box - Enable additional actions in the right click menu.

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  • Seems unrelated; I tried it and it affects only the context menu for me. Sorry if this in fact is the answer to the original question.
    – Nickolay
    Oct 10, 2012 at 14:04
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Somewhat related problem: the "Paste options" dropdown might not appear at all when pasting, if the option to make that happen got disabled somehow.

The option is File -> Options -> Advanced -> "Cut, Copy, and Paste" section -> "Show Paste Options button when content is pasted". One time it got disabled, although I didn't turn it off explicitly.

Excel Options screenshot

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For VNC users: The option "Share clipboard with VNC Server", when is enabled, leads to that problem when working remotely. Just turn it off and the special paste options will work again.

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