Turning Off the Clipboard Icon

Often when Steve is writing a Word document, he sees an icon of a clipboard and piece of paper. It normally appears just to the right of an edit. If he clicks the icon, it provides three or four choices. Steve finds this icon very annoying, as it often covers a word he's working on and he can't get rid of it. Steve never uses this icon and wonders if there is any way of turning off this "feature" so the icon never appears.

The icon to which Steve is referring is most likely the Paste Options box, as it has a small clipboard displayed on it. The Paste Options box appears when you paste something into a document, just to the right of whatever it is that you pasted. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Paste Options box.

The icon drives some people nuts, but (believe it or not) it can actually be quite helpful. For instance, if you are pasting information that you copied from another document and you don't want to transfer the formatting to the current document, there is an option for that type of paste within the drop-down.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you can get rid of the Paste Options box by immediately pressing the Esc key after it appears. (Some folks think you need to do some other edit in order to make it go away; not so—a simple Esc press should do the trick.)

If you are bound and determined to get rid of it, you can configure Word to not display it. Follow these steps:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 and later versions display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. At the left side of the dialog box click Advanced.
3. Scroll through the available options until you get to the Cut, Copy, and Paste section. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. The Cut, Copy, and Paste section of the Word Options dialog box.

4. Clear the Show Paste Options Button option (Word 2007) or the Show Paste Options Button When Content Is Pasted option (later versions of Word).
5. Click OK.

The Paste Options box should no longer appear as you copy and paste information on your system.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13446) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.