Vista's ClipBoard Manager Gadget

Don Bradbury takes a shine to this useful little downloadable add-on

Of the many gadgets you can download and install on Vista PCs, one of the better ones, in our limited experience, is the ClipBoard Manager. This is one you have to download; it's not in the Vista release list. We simply could not operate without a multi-clip utility on each of our computers, software that lets you capture, store, and use as many times as we like, a number of clips on the PC. Windows' own ClipBoard, in contrast, in still just a single item utility, replacing the previous clip in its buffer each time you use it.

A multi-clip facility is very useful. It lets you copy and paste multiple items from one location to another within a document or spreadsheet, say, or an email or PowerPoint file and so on, or paste the clips to a different file altogether. We have become attached, over the years, to ClipMate, although there are successful competitors. Now, with this Vista gadget, while you won't have all the facilities of the specialist programs, you have at least got the essentials to hand.

Written by Honza Zeman, ClipBoard Manager lets you change the font size (4 to 16; we prefer 7), the maximum number of characters on display in the cache line (10 to 99; we chose 24 to maximise the number of clip lines on the board), and even the colour of the clips in the store, either by simply typing in the name of the colour you choose or, if you're really fussy, using a full-spectrum colour picker, for the use of which you are sent off to a web site.

ClipBoard Manager also lets you modify the background image to a plain colourwash - which is just as well as we can't imagine why anyone would want a graphic behind their clips, making them much more difficult to read, though there's a large number of such backgrounds to choose from if you want that option. We think the grey/green plain backdrop makes visibility excellent while preserving some semblance of panache.

With this setup you can see text clips in the buffer with up to the first twenty four characters, and that's usually sufficient to remind you of the context of that particular clip. You can also see about half a dozen clips, and if there are more added, the board just adds them to the bottom the list, while still further clips are added to the top of the list and the rest scroll off the bottom into oblivion. Clearing the clips is a matter of clicking on the "clear X" icon on the board, otherwise they survive a reboot.

One thing we'd like to see added to ClipBoard Manager is the facility to scroll the list to select clips taken earlier than the current board full, though most clips will be short-term so that the on-board clips will generally suffice. It's certainly a considerable improvement on the "single clip to the ClipBoard and that's it" offering of Windows.

As we said, we captured graphics to ClipBoard Manager; in this case all you see is a {non-visible} clip indicator or similar, and we didn't have much luck grabbing multiple graphics; one or two seems to be it. But you can copy/paste that graphic to a different location from the original if you have to.

In conclusion

Mr Zeman's ClipBoard Manager, while not perfect, is a worthy addition to Vista's Gadgets list. Invaluable to writers and others who regularly need to copy text, graphics and the like to different locations within a document, or to different documents. There's no long-term store for clips, and there's no scrolling provision to find off-board, earlier clips. But this is a good start and we must encourage Zeman and other such worthies to add to the stock of the more useful among the Vista Gadgets.

Don Bradbury