Review: Free Clipboard Help+Spell adds a lot of power to your clipboard

On their own, X, C, and V are just three random letters. But combine them with the Ctrl key, and you get one of the most iconic keystroke trios in the history of computing. Cutting, copying, and pasting data is something we all do on a daily basis, so doing it more efficiently can translate into major time savings. Clipboard Help+Spell is a donationware utility by Mouser that does just that.

You may recall developer Mouser from other hits such as Find and Run Robot, Snapshot Captor, and Web Link Captor. And indeed, Clipboard Help+Spell carries his distinctive style: comprehensive Options dialog, multiple interface layouts, and other niceties that add up to the feeling that if you just dig deep enough, you can get Clipboard Help+Spell to do just about anything.

Clipboard Help+Spell's default layout can appear confusing at first.

Much like competitor ArsClip, Clipboard Help+Spell features a powerful pop-up menu that lets you use most of the application's features without having to switch away from the program in use. The menu shows a list of recently copied text snippets, any of which take just a single keystroke to paste in at the cursor. You can also set aside a bunch of favorite clips so that you always have them handy, paste the current date and time in multiple formats, format selected text in various ways (such as title and sentence case), and many other features.

True to its name, Clipboard Help+Spell does contain a spellchecker, but it's not very visible in daily use.

One of the nicest Clipboard Help+Spell features is called the Stack. At any point during your work, you can pop open the menu and set a "start stack" marker. Clipboard Help+Spell then records the series of items you copy, and lets you paste them back in the same sequence, one by one. This is very useful when transferring information manually from a text document into a spreadsheet, for example. You can just focus on finding and copying the information, and paste it into the spreadsheet later. That’s much faster than having to constantly switch back and forth between the document and the spreadsheet.

Clipboard Help+Spell lets you quickly transform selected text in a number of sophisticated ways.

Clipboard Help+Spell does have a built-in spell-checker, but you can't use it through the pop-up menu: You need to switch to the program's main window and select a clip to work on. You can then read through the clip and hunt for words with a red squiggly underline (just like in Microsoft Word), or execute a spell-check on the snippet, which pops open a spelling dialog on every error. So, spellchecking is available, but it isn't the star of the show.

Like many of Mouser's utilities, Clipboard Help+Spell is brimming with customization settings and options.

In truth, most Clipboard Help+Spell users probably won't scratch the surface of this complex and powerful beast. But even if you only use 10% of what it has to offer, you'll still end up with a more powerful and flexible, clipboard. Try it out.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Give Your Windows Clipboard Extra Features Using ClipboardFusion

It's happened to all of us at one time or another. We get an email or a block of text, and we want to copy/paste it into another email or word processing document. But when we copy the text, the formatting comes with it. The text is then too big, the links are still embedded, there's lots of white space and paragraphs, and generally everything is a big mess that takes time to sort out. That's where free program ClipboardFusion comes in to save you a big headache.

Screenshot Fusion offers a wide variety of options to customize your Windows Clipboard.ClipboardFusion is a small Windows desktop app which sits in your system tray and waits for you to copy/paste something. It will then remove all the formatting, white space, and HTML tags, so what you're left with is just pure text. You can then paste it into an email, Word document, or other program.

But I would be doing ClipboardFusion a severe injustice if I implied that was all it did. A few other features make this a great app to have running in the background of your PC. First of all, you can assign keyboard shortcuts for all of CF's features. So for example, using a keyboard shortcut, you can toggle the app on and off without even taking your fingers off the keyboard.

You can also replace certain text strings with pre-defined new text strings. So for example, maybe you want all '&' to be replaced by "and" (or vice versa)? Or perhaps you want to replace the name of something with another name? It's entirely up to you. You just need to maintain a list of text strings inside CF's options that are to be automatically replaced as soon as you copy the text. It's very similar to the find-and-replace feature in Microsoft Word, but it works across all your programs. If you have copied images to your Windows Clipboard, then CF will give you a preview of those images in a pop-up window. You can see at a glance what you have copied. That same pop-up window will also show you RGB color codes if you copied them too.

ClipboardFusion's interface is easy to navigate.But ClipboardFusion's best feature is the macros. Using pre-defined scripts, you can make your copied text do almost anything. And what's even better is that a small CF community makes and contributes macro scripts that you can copy and use. For example, one macro cleans up long, unwieldy Amazon URLs in the Clipboard. Another counts the number of words in a copied block of text.

Don't copy anything to the clipboard that might cause trouble for you if it got out. Of course, you can just wipe the app's history afterwards, but you may not always remember to do that. Play it safe.

A paid option lets you store your clipboard pastes in the cloud on ClipboardFusion's website servers. A one-year subscription costs $16, two years costs $24, and a lifetime subscription costs $35 (all prices in Canadian dollars). Some may like the convenience of having their copied Clipboard pastes online for easy access and convenience, but others may not like the privacy and security implications of anything sensitive being transferred to the company servers.

ClipboardFusion's free desktop app is well worth downloading if you do a lot of copy/pasting. Just remember to clear the clipboard history, if there's anything embarrassing on there, to save yourself any potential repercussions later.

—Mark O'Neill

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