ClipBook can be a handy feature

Windows XP has a little known holding area called the ClipBook.

As most people know, when you cut or copy items, they are temporarily stored on the Windows Clipboard until you cut or copy another piece of information, which overwrites the first. The ClipBook Viewer is used to view the information you have copied to the Clipboard or to store information that you can use again.

You won’t find the ClipBook Viewer on your Start menu anywhere, so you need to create a shortcut for it. To create the shortcut, follow these steps:

1. Right-click on an empty area of your desktop and choose New|Shortcut.

2. In the Create Shortcut Wizard type “%windir%\system32\

clipbrd.exe” and then click Next.

3. Give the shortcut a more meaningful name like ClipBook and click Finish.

Now, to open the viewer, double-click your new ClipBook shortcut. You see a window called Clipboard that shows you the last thing that was cut or copied. Finding out what’s on the Clipboard is only mildly interesting, but you also can use the ClipBook Viewer to cut or copy information from another program and store it on a page that you can name and save.

You can even share your ClipBook Viewer pages with other people who have the ClipBook Viewer installed.

For such a tiny program, it has rather detailed online help. It actually can be quite useful for sharing little snippets of information, so if you’re curious, choose Help|Contents for all the detailed step-by-step information.