How to clear clipboard on Android in 3 seconds

Why clear a clipboard?

First up, let’s understand what a clipboard is! 

When you copy a text on your Android phone, it gets temporarily saved in the clipboard. Once you paste the copied text in a text field, the contents in the clipboard are erased. 

So every time you copy text on your Android, the previous data gets erased and replaced by the newly copied text. 

So why do you need to clear a clipboard? Is it even necessary? Well, actually not! A normal Android user wouldn’t think of clearing something as trivial as a clipboard. 

Moreover, a clipboard doesn’t store lots of information to clear and thus doesn’t occupy a lot of space. However, the native clipboard on your Android device has access to all the content copied and stores it. Also, it offers clipboard managing features. 

Well, you can clear the native clipboard just to free up a bit of space and for privacy concerns. No one wants others to access the content stored on their clipboard, to see our private messages. 

To help you with this, I’m going to list down a few ways you can clear the clipboard on your Android. Besides, I’ll teach you how you can manage the clipboard on your Android device and will conclude with some quick accessibility tips.

Read on to find out more!  

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How to add contents to clipboard

Before we learn more about clearing the clipboard on Android, let me walk you through the ways you can add contents to the clipboard. 

1. Copy the text

The simplest way to add content to the clipboard is by copying the text. While copying the text on PC is all about selecting the text and pressing Ctrl + C, on Android devices the text is selected by long pressing the text.

To copy a text on Android, 

Step 1: Just press and hold the text you want to copy until the text is selected and highlighted with blue or another color depending on the phone model. 

Step 2: Now, adjust the handles on either side by dragging them to the start and end of the content you would like to copy to the clipboard. 

Step 3: Once you have selected the text, tap ‘Copy’. The text will be copied to the clipboard. 

When you copy another text, the older text will vanish and be replaced by the new text. Make sure you paste the copied text where you intend to paste it. 

Once you turn off or restart your phone, you won’t be able to recover the original text if the native clipboard isn’t enabled. 

2. Enable Gboard clipboard

This is an easy way to add multiple content or text in the clipboard. Most Android phones come installed with Gboard – Google’s very own keyboard. Gboard’s clipboard lets you copy text and images in the clipboard for one hour. 

It offers way more features than the default Android keyboard like text-to-speech conversion, translation, GIF, sticker, theme customization, one-handed mode, floating mode, and more accessibility features. 

To enable Gboard’s clipboard on Android to add multiple content to it, follow the steps below:

Step 1: Open an app which requires typing to turn the keyboard on

Step 2: Tap the menu button (three adjacent dots)

Step 3: Next, select the Clipboard option

Step 4:  Now, tap the Turn on clipboard button 

Once you turn the clipboard on, you’ll see all the recent texts copied in the Gboard clipboard. To paste the copied content, just tap each copied text block in the clipboard. To manage the clipboard, tap the edit button (pencil icon) on the top right corner. 

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How to clear clipboard on Android: 3 methods

1. Copy another text

Again, copying another text automatically clears the clipboard. As mentioned earlier, once you copy another text, the previously copied text gets erased from the clipboard memory. 

2. From keyboard settings

Moving on to the next way to clear the clipboard on Android, keyboard settings lets you delete all the contents in the clipboard or only the selected texts. Here’s how to do it!

Step 1: Open an app which requires typing to turn the keyboard on

Step 2: Tap the menu button (three adjacent dots)

Step 3: Next, select the Clipboard option

Step 4: You’ll see all the texts copied in the clipboard. To clear them, tap the edit button.

Step 5: Select all the texts or selected texts you would like to delete from the clipboard and tap the delete button.

All the texts in the clipboard will be deleted. 

Alternatively, you can long press any text to delete it instantly.

3. Third-party app

Besides the above two methods, you can make use of a third party application to clear and manage the clipboard on your Android device. 

For this article, I tested the Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard. There’s a reason why SwiftKey is one of the best keyboards on Android. It personalizes your typing experience by analyzing your writing style for quick typing. 

One of the top features of the SwiftKey keyboard is the clipboard manager feature. 

Get the app on the Play Store by clicking the below button.

To clear the content in the SwiftKey Keyboard, follow these steps.

Step 1: Tap the plus icon on the top left corner of the keyboard and select Clipboard. It will display all the recently copied texts. 

Step 2: Select the texts and tap delete. 

To paste the texts in the text field, just select those you’d like to paste. 

The keyboard stores the copied text for one hour and erases it later. To save a text for a longer time, you can pin the text. 

Quick texting tips

1. Make use of frequent phrases to send instant text messages. For instance, if you’re in a meeting and want to send a quick message, just press and hold the cursor in the text field and tap frequent phrases. Select the best phrase that suits your situation. 

2. To quickly copy a URL on the Chrome browser, just tap the URL in the search bar and hit the copy button. 

3. To copy a phone number from a WhatsApp chat and other chats, press and hold the number. The number will be directly copied to the clipboard. 

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How to read deleted WhatsApp messages on Android?

FAQs

Become a clipboard ninja!

This was all you needed to know about clearing and managing the clipboard on Android. The built-in Android keyboard does allow you to copy text to the clipboard, but using Gboard or SwiftKey keyboard can let you do more. 

Clearing the clipboard, adding multiple texts to it, deleting selected texts, and pasting all the texts from the clipboard in one shot is easier with the methods I mentioned in this article. 

I hope this article brought some value to your Android usage. Let me know in the comments section if you know a few other clipboard or texting tips for Android. Take care and stay safe! See you next time, cheers!