Copy paste bug in libre writer

Never any progress on this frustrating bug. It only ever happens to LibreOffice products (I’m using Calc & Writer). Pasting into other programs is never a problem. When the paste is ignored I exit/ restart all LibreOffice products, then ctrl+V of the latest item in the clipboard is again accepted. After a general search I see quite a few other topics with other frustrated users that seem to have no solution either. How to progress this?

Try turning off Suggested Actions in clipboard. Assuming you have a North American version of Windows, otherwise you won’t have that optio.

Maybe you have a YouTube downloader installed? They intercept the clipboard and can lock it

@robleyd - thanks - Suggested Actions in clipboard - how? Settings > System > Clipboard doesn’t have a setting like that. BTW I’ve now turned off Clipboard history. North American version of Windows? I have Windows 11 Home 23H2 22631.3737. I’m in Australia but Settings > System > About makes no mention of “North American version” or any other country.
@EarnestAl - thanks - but no, I don’t have a YouTube downloader installed. As I said this ONLY affects pasting to LibreOffice Calc & Writer. Restart them & they will accept the paste.

I don’t use LibreOffice Draw much, but now find exactly the same bug there too. ctrl+V worked a few times then not pasting. Paste into Notepad OK. Exit/ restart Draw, and ctrl+V then works again in Draw, presumably until the next lockout. Although I didn’t test/ check, I guess that precisely when the lockout occurred, Writer & Calc would have then shared the same issue.

I believe I may have had this occur on my system also, but I didn’t know to look out for it so haven’t kept details on the specifics. Each time I worked around it by pasting into notepad, then copying that text and pasting it into LibreOffice. A LibreOffice restart wasn’t required (?same or different bug?)

This makes me wonder whether there is an issue with formatting or non-printing characters causing the paste into LibreOffice to fail without error?!

Windows 10
LibreOffice versions from 7.? to 24.2.4.2
Also Australian locale

Found a report of accented characters causing the issue, which may have been the issue I was having as I do regularly copy/paste Norwegian text.

@AndrewHeard you might be interested in the following thread. The Windows clipboard is known to be outdated but is yet to be fixed. The thread contains a link at the bottom for a small program to return the program that has the clipboard open, it seems to be fine and was originally available on the microsoft developer site. If you don’t trust old programs though the thread also contains a VBS script to do the same thing.

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Thanks a lot @Ash733. I’m pretty sure not related to accented characters (not 100%, will confirm next time it happens); just plain ASCII. When LibreOffice fails to accept the latest clipboard, I often paste into Notepad (Sublime Text) & Vivaldi (plain text boxes) simply to confirm they are both OK, and I have indeed copied text, and they are always OK. Thanks for the link - I downloaded GetOpenClipboardWindow.zip. Next time I will run GetOpenClipboardWindow.exe & report back here.

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Excellent. I’ve done the same and will try to remember to document it here, mind you that’s probably fixed it now :joy:

Interestingly a similar perhaps related issue on a Mac with Kazakh/Russian language but works with English.

Finally got this bug to expose itself again. Clipboard has plain ASCII text “INSERT INTO public.instances(instance_timestamp) VALUES (NOW());” in it (without the double quotes). I can paste it into this very multiline textbox, notepad, various other textboxes, BUT LibreWriter will paste the previous clipboard contents! I can run the VB GetOpenClipboardWindow.exe and it displays the message “Successfully opened & closed the clipboard”. Interestingly the VB EXE filename I pasted here was using the clipboard with keyboard sequence: F2 (in Windows Explorere) > ctrl+Insert > shift+Insert sequence, and Writer now also accepts that clipboard text. Unfortunately I can’t go back & check whether the act of running GetOpenClipboardWindow.exe made a difference or not. Interesting! I’ll check this behavior when LW next does the wrong thing.

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OK some useful information - when LibreOffice is rejecting a clipboard paste (although other programs still paste OK), and I then run VB GetOpenClipboardWindow.exe, AND NOW LibreOffice will paste the clipboard correctly. Where do we go with issue now?

Did GetOpenClipboardWindow report any program had the clipboard open? I’m presuming it didn’t; which is problematic as it would have been far easier to solve if something had kept it open. At this point I don’t think we’ve progressed anywhere, we still don’t know if the problem is with the clipboard, some other program keeping it open, or LibreOffice.

I’ve had a similar problem once or twice since you reported it and I’ve tried and tried and tried to reproduce it but it’s so inconsistent and seemingly random (perhaps the same issue, perhaps not).

Perhaps open a bug report with the info you’ve found here, it does seem to be more than what had been reported before.

@Ash733 - VB program msgbox has always been:
GetOpenClipboardWindow
Sucessfully opened and closed the clipboard. Does not appear to be any problems.
OK

At this point I don’t think we’ve progressed anywhere
I know if ONLY affects LibreOffice Writer & Calc, and has been consistent for me, at least. Is this the correct URL - https://bugs.documentfoundation.org?

Note, for me at least, this is a relatively recent bug, in terms of LO versions. i.e. it never used to happen.

bug URL: 162029 – LibreOffice products don't accept the current clipboard contents for pasting, pastes the previous contents

For links to markdown formatting, see This is the guide - How to use the Ask site? - #6 by erAck

Maybe this post in answers.microsoft has a pointer, keep Windows from sleeping, Clipboard problems (can not copy/paste) in Windows 11

thanks - I removed the multiple msgbox hyphens to fix it.

Seems from bugzilla this bug has been known before April 2022 - 148647 – LO pastes previously copied content instead of what was last copied from other app (Windows 10; see comment 11) and NINE other bug reports.
image

with possible fix even just yesterday - 148647 – LO pastes previously copied content instead of what was last copied from other app (Windows 10; see comment 11)

…which was mentioned above :wink:

But thanks for filing a bug report - in fact, the usually suggested exercise of finding existing bugs before filing an own one is, IMO, a waste of time, and my usual advise is: you see something that, in your opinion, misbehaves - you don’t hesitate, and just file a new bug. For one, you could be intimidated by the huge bug database with hundreds of thousands of issues, where people use all kinds of language to express their problems, and get lost much easier than the triagers who know the usual issues well, and who can find duplicates much easier than you, and in the process of looking for a duplicate, an inexperienced user could loose their incentive to file it - and having a duplicate is so much better than not having it filed at all; and also, duplicates (and CCed people) have own value of indicating the importance and spread of the problem (we use these numbers as a metric of bug importance / severity, even more useful than the bugs’ respective meta fields).

The only pre-requisite to filing bugs must be the proper expectations, where the user does not take closing their bugs as not a bug as a personal insult: closing bugs in such a way is also a positive thing, where the user gets an explanation / reason for the behavior; and filing these (not-a-)bugs is also appreciated as an important contribution.

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Very kind of you Mike. I still “try” to see if my bug is a duplicate, and given the # worldwide users, surely most of the time it will be, as I’m making unnecessary work for others to mark as a duplicate & close. You’ve explained why/ why not, so don’t further reply :wink:

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