While I am not a contributor to the Word MVP site, since I was the person
who, I believe, initially posted my fondness for the Clipboard, let me
explain how and why I use it.
Firstly, I too find the Clipboard task pane an annoyance most of the time. I
chose not to have it staring at me for most of my work, so I simply hide the
Task Pane or have a different part of the Task Pane visible.
A recent job I undertook was to work for a school district and take all of
the curriculum guides that had been typed, handwritten or on diskette and
put them all onto the template that the curriculum committee wanted. This
work was for a high school in Massachusetts and all of the guides had to
conform to state standards with a huge amount of educational jargon on each
page. Some of the guides for just one course totaled over 100 legal size
pages, but the actual content from the teacher was relatively tiny, with the
bulk of the text coming from the state standards on
Framework Strands
Framework Standards
Assessment
Performance Rubrics
Instructional Standards
Student Performance Levels, etc., etc., etc.
Most of this was extremely repetitive. Each page might have had only a tiny
input from the teacher, and the rest was how that tiny item related to the
state standards.
Leave it to the state to take a simple two page summary of the year and turn
it into a 100 page behemoth! But these guides had to be done that way in all
subjects!
When the teachers did the guides, they were using many of the same text
entries on page after page.
It certainly would have been possible to copy one and then paste it, copy
another and then paste it, go back and copy the first one and then paste it,
etc.
What I did was copy them all and paste them onto the Clipboard in Word 2002.
Now as I was looking at the teachers handwritten notes, or as I was looking
at his typed file where he had put in the number of the Strand, Standard,
Rubric (or whatever), I would take that item from the appropriate place on
the Clipboard and simply paste the full entry into the right section. With
24 entries available, I was all set for that particular subject. When I was
doing another subject, I would have to copy the items that applied there so
I could use them later.
Each item on the Clipboard displays three lines of the entry so you can
easily tell one Clipboard entry from the other and pick the right one.
This one job took me almost 200 hours. Having the Clipboard available made
things so much easier.
As happens almost always, you could find other ways of doing the same thing.
But for my way of working, the Clipboard was my tool of choice.
In short, I would not bother with the Clipboard for a routine letter, memo,
etc. But for doing other types of jobs, Word 2002 more than paid for itself
by having this feature available!!
