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pastelsky Author

Level 1

39 points

Copy/Paste broken in MacOS Sierra

I upgraded to MacOS Sierra yesterday, and since then I cannot copy paste across apps.

For eg. copying text from chrome allows me to paste it in chrome, but pastes nothing on safari or my text editor.

This probably has something to do with Universal Copy/Paste ? How can I disable it? Can't do any productive work without copy/paste

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch,Early 2015), macOS Sierra (10.12)

Posted on Sep 22, 2016 11:34 PM

Top-ranking reply

AlexM007

Level 1

9 points

Posted on May 8, 2017 6:38 AM

I found a solution that worked for me:

--------------

I *Copied and *Pasted this from: (https://danwarne.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/fix-stuck-mac-os-clipboard-copypaste/)

Something has been bugging me with OS X for a while — sometimes the OS X clipboard (officially known as “pasteboard”) gets stuck and won’t accept any new ‘copied’ content. Instead, when you ‘paste’ in any app, the clipboard always pastes back the last thing you successfully copied.

One solution to this is to reboot the Mac, but since Mac OS X is generally so stable and doesn’t need to be periodically rebooted as a matter of course, rebooting a machine with many open apps and windows can be a hassle.

Searching for this issue online provides a lot of bad advice (one website I saw said “repair permissions and if that doesn’t work, reinstall the OS”… terrible advice.)

Other websites incorrectly advise to kill the PBS process and restart it.

Apple’s manual page for PBS notes it is not related to the Pasteboard process. Instead, the correct process to kill is PBoard.

So, to fix a stuck clipboard (pasteboard) problem, you simply need to:

1. Open your application folder

2. Open the utilities subfolder

3. Open the Activity Monitor app

4. Type “pboard” into the search box at the top right

5. In the search results below, there should only be one result — a row listing the “pboard” process. Highlight it by clicking on it.

6. Click the “x” button at the top left of the window which represents ‘quit this process’

Once you’ve done that, OS X will kill the faulty PBoard process and re-establish it with a fresh one automatically. Your clipboard should be back to normal.

I have a suspicion that this stuck clipboard is a bug in OS X Mavericks 10.9 – I don’t recall it happening before I installed that. It is still an (infrequent) current problem as at 10.9.2."

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88 replies

Nov 22, 2016 3:01 AM in response to BigOutcomes

What versions of Numbers and Pages?

I tried this on my mac (running 10.12.1), with Numbers 4.0.5 (build 4052), and Pages 6.0.5 (build 4052) and had no trouble copying and pasting a table from Numbers to Pages. I got a fully editable table, with all formatting and content intact.

Nov 23, 2016 11:41 PM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Thanks Luis... it seems your question has led us to the answer.

I'd thought that the OS and apps were all the most recent versions, however I found out this wasn't the case for Pages. There have been no recent notifications in my App Store to update Pages (as there were for Numbers & Keynote) which means that I was running an old version.

As I couldn't update the regular way, I navigated to Pages in the App store, downloaded the missing update and this bug is now fixed.

Thanks!

🙂