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Turn off the Clipboard Toolbar in Office 2000 and Office XP

If you copy something to the clipboard twice in any part of Microsoft Office 2000 or XP, a tiny "Clipboard" toolbar will appear. This toolbar, which covers your work and requires that you stop what you're doing to close it or get it out of the way, is not only annoying, but impossible to turn off. Unfortunately, Microsoft has neglected to provide a "don't show this again" option.

The purpose of the Clipboard toolbar is to allow you to store up to a dozen items in the clipboard, but if you didn't specifically intend to use this feature, the little toolbar just gets in the way. Here's how to turn it off for good.

Office 2000:

  • Run the Registry Editor (REGEDIT.EXE).
  • Expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Office\ 9.0\ Common\ General. If any of these branches aren't there, just create them - one by one - by selecting New and then Key from the Edit menu.
  • Once you've highlighted the General key, select New and then DWORD Value from the Edit menu. As the name of this new key, type AcbControl.
  • Double-click on the new value, select Decimal, type 1 in the Value Data field, and click Ok when you're done. This change should take effect immediately.

Note: supposedly, Office 2000 should automatically disable the clipboard toolbar automatically if you close said toolbar three times in succession. However, this is sortof a hassle, and doesn't seem to work reliably. The above is really the quickest and most direct solution.

Office XP:

  • Open an Office application, and select Options from the Tools menu.
  • Choose the Edit tab and turn off the Show Paste Options buttons and Show Insert Options buttons options.
  • Click Ok when you're done.


Written by: Annoyances.org
Last updated: Thursday, February 3, 2005

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