The clipboard has been part of Windows since its earliest versions. It conveniently holds everything you copy—images, links, or text—in temporary memory, which is cleared when you shut down your PC daily.
I used to think that was all there was to it, until I discovered the Advanced Paste feature in Microsoft PowerToys. It builds on the traditional clipboard’s capabilities and adds more modern and powerful new features infused with AI. This makes copying and pasting more efficient and versatile.
- OS
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Windows
- Developer
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Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft PowerToys is a free, open-source collection of utilities for Windows users designed to enhance productivity and customize the Windows experience. It includes tools for window management, file renaming, color picking, and quick access to applications and system functions.
First: enable Advanced Paste in Microsoft PowerToys
Supercharging the clipboard is easier than it looks
Enabling Advanced Paste is easy; it only takes a few clicks. The first step is to download and install Microsoft PowerToys from the Microsoft Store or GitHub. Once that’s done, follow the steps below:
- Launch PowerToys from the Start menu.
- Click System Tools in the side menu panel.
- From this menu, click Advanced Paste (it should be the first option).
- Toggle the Enable Advanced Paste option on.
- Scroll down to the Actions section within the Advanced Paste settings.
- Set your desired trigger shortcut key (I’ve set Win + Alt + V as a trigger key for Advanced Paste)
- Scroll down further and toggle on the features you’d like to use.
That’s it; now all you have to do is hit the trigger shortcuts to open the Advanced Paste window and paste your text however you choose. This can be image-to-text, saving text as files, or converting them.
What gives Advanced Paste an edge over the regular clipboard?
Advanced Paste in PowerToys unlocks a fleet of free, powerful clipboard extensions with many innovative features. You’ll find that copying and pasting complex texts and images is much easier and streamlined.
Format transformation without manual efforts
In the traditional Windows clipboard, you can only paste the content exactly as it was copied, or as plain text. This requires you to manually format the content before copying it.
Advanced Paste, on the other hand, can instantly convert copied content to plain text, Markdown, JSON, or HTML. It also supports saving directly as text or a PNG image. That’s just the start; Advanced Paste offers much more to simplify your copy-and-paste experience. This saves professionals hours of manual formatting.
Better copy history management
In Windows’ default clipboard, you can only copy and save up to 25 items, which are removed from history upon reboots. The Windows clipboard doesn’t even include a search for saved items. Previews are limited to a few lines for copied texts, and thumbnails are tiny for images and screenshots.
Advanced Paste has all the goodies from Windows’ clipboard history and more. It offers better-organized previews of clipboard items, such as text, copied files, and images. You can hover your mouse over items in the history to get a larger preview of the copied item.
The limit of copied items in the history is still capped at 25. But you can pin the items you paste frequently in Advanced Paste’s history so they won’t be removed when you copy a new item or delete ones you no longer need. If you need more history, many of the other best Windows clipboard managers let you save more.
OCR and file creation capabilities
You can copy and paste images and text with the Windows default clipboard using the classic Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V shortcuts. But if some sites don’t allow you to copy text directly, or if you want to extract text from screenshots or images, you don’t need any third-party tools.
Advanced Paste includes local OCR, allowing it to copy text from images. This Advanced Paste feature also lets you paste anything as a file directly in File Explorer.
This enables you to save large paragraphs as a text or PDF document, save text from images as a file, or even save a text block as a PNG. This makes saving files easy, as you cut out extra steps such as pasting text or images into Word and then choosing where to save them.
Advance Paste is great, but not flawless
Using Advanced Paste still makes sense
The Advanced Paste feature has optional AI capabilities that are deemed useless the moment you realize they require an OpenAI API subscription. The subscription includes a limit of 30K tokens per minute for Tier 1 users, which power users will find disappears quickly.
Another noticeable deficiency is that, despite its excellent feature set, Advanced Paste still doesn’t support persistent clipboard history. It clears the clipboard history the moment your PC reboots, unlike its counterparts, such as CopyQ, Ditto, or ClipClip, which let you save your copied history.
However, it still makes up for these shortcomings with the free, locally running features we’ve discussed. These AI features are optional bonuses on top of the solid baseline clipboard upgrade. And since PowerToys is constantly under development as an open-source project, we can expect alternative AI support from Copilot (which is really worth using in Windows), Gemini, or Grok, plus persistent clipboard history, in the near future.
Supercharge your clipboard with Advanced Paste
Advanced Paste elevates the humble clipboard on Windows, turning it into a modern, feature-packed productivity tool. Even excluding the AI features, the built-in free tools are well worth the download. It will immediately elevate and streamline your workflow, helping you get work done with less friction.
Advanced Paste is still rough around the edges. But with Microsoft PowerToys continuously getting updates, we can rest assured that the clipboard’s best days are ahead.