How To Create A 'Clear Clipboard History' Shortcut

The Windows Clipboard, Is a native utility that allows users to copy data from one source to another, In the form of copy & paste operations. Basically, It temporarily stores the Information (to be copied) In Ram, and releases It when It's pasted. By default, you need to select the contents first, and paste thereafter. It's also a security concern, whereby anyone can paste what you've previously copied and view It straight after that. As such, I will show you how to create a Clear Clipboard History shortcut on your desktop.


Whether you're working with an Office document, or navigating online by copying & pasting posts and links on Facebook, we all use the Windows Clipboard during our day-to-day computational tasks. If you've copied some sensitive data to the Clipboard, such as your password when creating a given online account, then anyone with physical access to your computer, can hit Ctrl+V and paste your details Into Notepad and take over your account.

What's more alarming, Is that If you have the Windows 10 October 2018 update Installed, It stores a history of Items that you've copied to the Clipboard- not just the last Item. This means that an array of Information can be collected from the Clipboard history!

To prevent this, I will demonstrate how to create a Clear Clipboard History shortcut on your computer's desktop, whereby with a double-click of the mouse, It will Instantly clear the contents from the Windows Clipboard In Its entirety. The process Is extremely simple, so without further delay, let's get this tutorial started.

Step One:

Firstly, navigate to your computer's desktop, right-click on a blank area and select New > Shortcut as shown below.

Step Two:

Next, In the Type the location of the Item field, enter the following command.

%windir%\System32\cmd.exe /c "echo off | clip"

Then hit Next to move forward.

Step Three:

Now you need to give your shortcut a name. It can be anything you like. For the purpose of this tutorial, I've named mine Windows 10 Tips Clear Clipboard. When you've applied yours, click Finish to finalize the process.

Step Four:

I've now navigated to my PC's desktop, and as you can see, the Clear Clipboard History shortcut has been successfully created. Let's double-click It In the next step.

Last Step:

Upon double-clicking the shortcut, the Command Prompt will open In a flash- If you blink, you'll miss It! As such, the Clipboard history will be completely cleared, which Is obviously the result we're after.

Final Thoughts:

I'd say It's safe to assume that prior to reading this tutorial, you probably haven't generated much thought Into the ramifications of someone accessing the contents from your computer's Clipboard. All It takes to clear It, Is a simple double-click of the mouse on the shortcut, so be sure to do exactly that quite regularly. If you have multiple users sharing your computer, use the Clear Clipboard History shortcut the moment you're finished with your computing session.