Google Sheets Feature – What is the Web Clipboard?

google sheets

I made a chart in Google Spreadsheets and then clicked on Copy Chart. A little popup notified me that the chart was copied to the web clipboard. However, when I try to paste the chart anywhere in the spreadsheet or in another Google doc via EditPaste, I can't. Nothing is pasted.

What is the web clipboard?

Best Answer

Browsers typically cannot access the OS clipboard - it would be a disaster if a web page could get access to your credit card number, that you happened to have copied, for example. Therefore, web apps cannot copy/paste to the OS clipboard, unless the user actively presses Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V or similar.

This makes copying/pasting spreadsheet data difficult, since it is not just a block of text or an image, but a more complex data structure (cells with content and formatting). To work around this, Google has implemented a replacement clipboard, which stores clips on their servers instead of in the OS clipboard. This is the web clipboard (also called Server clipboard or Cloud clipboard).

To paste from the web clipboard, click on the clipboard icon in the toolbar - don't use the Edit menu - and your copied item should be listed there. See this blogpost for explanation.