Prevent Excel from clearing copied data for pasting, after certain operations, without Office clipboard
Prevent Excel from clearing copied data for pasting, after certain operations, without Office clipboard
Prevent Excel from clearing copied data for pasting, after certain operations, without Office clipboard
Re: Prevent Excel from clearing copied data for pasting, after certain operations, without Office clipboard
The answer, unfortunately, is **no**, you can't stop this from happening.
As described by [Joel Spolsky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky), developer and program manager for excel:
The official reason is that Excel doesn't really have cut and paste,
it has move and copy. That's necessary because Excel automatically
does reference fix up. For example, if cell A2 is defined as =A1, and
you move cell A1 to A3, cell A2 will be updated to =A3.
If Excel actually cut things to the clipboard you would somehow need
to have a reference pointing >into< the clipboard which is bizarre and
for which there is no reasonable syntax. In other words, Excel doesn't
want to leave you with dangling references during a move operation and
isn't confident that it would be able to fix them up correctly when
you completed the move by selecting "Paste."
Joel Spolsky 3/9/2004
[source](https://web.archive.org/web/20160725070440/http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=3479)
What this means is that because of the difficulty inherent in the way excel maintains *references*, at the time of development there was no good way to store these references outside of excel and have them remain dynamic to be re-inserted. Once you change *focus* excel's ability to retain your original references is lost.
Unfortunately, MS does not consider this a bug.
As described by [Joel Spolsky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky), developer and program manager for excel:
The official reason is that Excel doesn't really have cut and paste,
it has move and copy. That's necessary because Excel automatically
does reference fix up. For example, if cell A2 is defined as =A1, and
you move cell A1 to A3, cell A2 will be updated to =A3.
If Excel actually cut things to the clipboard you would somehow need
to have a reference pointing >into< the clipboard which is bizarre and
for which there is no reasonable syntax. In other words, Excel doesn't
want to leave you with dangling references during a move operation and
isn't confident that it would be able to fix them up correctly when
you completed the move by selecting "Paste."
Joel Spolsky 3/9/2004
[source](https://web.archive.org/web/20160725070440/http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=3479)
What this means is that because of the difficulty inherent in the way excel maintains *references*, at the time of development there was no good way to store these references outside of excel and have them remain dynamic to be re-inserted. Once you change *focus* excel's ability to retain your original references is lost.
Unfortunately, MS does not consider this a bug.