I play with and use Windows 10 Insider builds but don’t often blog about them – there’s plenty of other people that do that already. However, I saw this notification come up which seemed very useful; Clipboard History!

Something I’ve been wanting for many years. I currently use Ditto which I recommended in another writeup of free sysadmin tools for TechTarget. However, if a native solution does enough for me I’d rather use that – I’m on that many different systems and devices, having non-native apps is a pain that I’m not going to bother with.

I might be a bit late to the party – on May 9th 2018, Build 17666 was announced with this feature. I’ve had a quick play and like it… so how does it work?

First, go into Settings > System > Clipboard. You’ll need to toggle the ‘Save multiple items’ to ‘On’. This is probably good being off by default, I can imagine complaints about Microsoft tracking what people do or someone finding something in the history that another person did.

Once that option is on, you can use Windows Key + V to bring up the clipboard history window:

It will be blank at the start, unless you’ve used the clipboard since enabling the feature. Text and images are both supported which is great! Selecting the history item will immediately paste it as well as put it onto your clipboard. It’s basic but does the job

On top of this, there’s also a ‘Sync across devices’ option for the clipboard history. You can enable that in the same settings area, and your clipboard will be available from all devices that support it. Right now that seems to only be Windows 10 on this insider build or newer, but I’d expect it to go further to mobile devices when released properly. This is a great way to send a small bit of information such as a long URL from one device to another.

However, if you use a password manager where you copy and paste usernames and passwords from, they’ll get added to this history also. If someone were able to gain access to this history, it could be a quick gateway to accessing a lot of your other stuff – so use multi-factor authentication wherever you can.

Still, it’s a great feature albeit simple – it’s nice to see Windows 10 getting loaded with different mini-utilities that add to it’s usefulness, while leveraging a centralised Microsoft account to keep and sync information.