Prevent Excel from clearing copied data for pasting, after certain operations, without Office clipboard?

Question

Whenever you copy a cell or a range of cells in Excel (my version is 2010 on Windows 7), and then do something else like insert new sheet row or simply edit another cell, Excel removes the clipboard data. For me this seems to me so utterly stupid and it's very frustrating (probably it has some logic behind it like preserving references or something like that, but I don't think it would be rocket science to make it work like any other program that has Copy-Paste available). The only workaround is to use the Office clipboard, but I don't want to (uses space on the screen and it's a lot less comfortable than CTRL+V) and I don't think I should be forced to use it.Here's a reference to some posts also complaining about this problem:https://superuser.com/questions/222428/excel-loses-reference-to-data-to-copy-when-i-type-elsewhere-on-the-sheethttps://superuser.com/questions/595491/excel-2010-removes-data-from-clipboard-how-can-i-stop-itIs there any way I can force Excel to keep my data into the clipboard until **I** decide I don't need it no more instead of it, **without** using the annoying (to me) Office clipboard? Maybe using the Windows clipboard.Or at least you could explain to me why this is happening (I know this is normal behavior, but why?)

Answer 1

The Office clipboard exists partially as the workaround to this. If you are working within Excel when pasting, you can use formulas to equal the selected data instead. This way, if you edit the data, the changes will be updated, but any rows columns added in will be ignored. This will still work if you're moving data from one sheet to another by using a formula such as =Sheet1!A1.

Alternatively, you can just copy the data into a throwaway worksheet, copy it from that worksheet, and then do whatever you want to do with the original source data. I'd recommend deleting the extra worksheet when done to reduce the file size if you are working with large files.