Sunday, January 09, 2005

ClipTray - Welcome Back!

I’ve just rediscovered a long lost utility.  I used ClipTray in the past but, for some reason, didn’t reload when moving to a new PC. I don't know why but just remembered it as was doing lots of copy/paste while formatting a document. I found it again and in the time I was away its got better.

ClipTray is a “clipboard accelerator” that runs in the system tray gathering up the items you copy/paste. So what you say, the windows clipboard does that for one clip and some Office applications remember multiple clips?

ClipTray has many more features and works with any application. Once items are copied you can:

  • Paste the last item copied with Control+V as normal.
  • Or fly-out the ClipTray system tray history menu:
    • Pick any object previously copied object to be pasted with Control+V.
    • See format indicated by the application icon.
    • See a tool-tip preview with text or image and other information like clipboard status (Current/not), source application exe, size (pixels or characters)
  • For Text Clips you can also:
    • Reformat: Upper/Lower/Mixed/Sentence Case, Remove leading/trailing/multiple spaces & Line breaks.
  • Email text based Clips (creates new message with text added) but not images
  • For web link Clips: Open in same/new browser.
  • You  can save clips permanently so you never have to type that email address, link etc again!

These are the features I like but there are more. One is the price which is great: its Freeware! 

If you do a lot of editing its a great time saver and now runs in my system tray nearly all the time. The only thing I've found is it can occasionally interfere with export of large MindManager Map exports to Office applications as this involves multiple automated copy/pastes. I just close ClipTray while doing these. Other than that, if you do lots of document editing, I recommend you give it a try!

ClipTray: Put the clipboard in your system tray!