Question: Excel 2013 often complains that "We couldn't free up space on the clipboard. Another program might be using it right now" when I'm trying to copy cells. 

Some [say](http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-excel/we-couldnt-free-up-space-on-the-clipboard-another/93ffe338-d07a-4e2d-bc07-49806f811dca) it might be caused by Zone Alarm or Bing Desktop. I have none of them. I'm running Windows 7, so I don't have [clipbrd.exe](https://superuser.com/q/531984/116475). How can I know which is the other program Excel is complaining about?

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cyPAF.png)

Answer: 
Hope this helps someone else. I have a user a HP Z820 workstation with windows 7 Professional sp1, 32GB RAM, 1TB drive with ~712GB free space, Office 2013 sp1. Yes, it’s a workstation but this user runs a lot of programs at once including large excel spreadsheets with pivot tables. They recently started having this error when trying to drag data in an excel cell to another cell. They figured out that if Outlook is not running then the error does not come up. But that is not workable as there is a need for the user to have outlook, word, and excel to be opened at the same time. I figured some other app was interfering with the clipboard since this error was not happening from day one when I installed office. I started to close programs one at a time and test after each. The last program I closed that allowed outlook to be open and not get the error message in excel was skitch. The user had installed skitch to allow them to capture screens and bring it into Evernote from other applications. And apparently the combination of Outlook and Skitch causes Excel to complain when you try to drag cell content to another cell. I could reproduce this every time. So if you have office 2013 sp1 and you have both outlook and excel running with skitch running in the background and you get the error when dragging cells in excel, simply go to the system tray area and kill skitch.
This is an old question but I thought I'd post my experiences with it so it may help others.

I am also having this error but I finally figured it out. I went through the task manager and started to kill all process and testing drag/drop. Once I killed the Dropbox process, the error went away. So it seems if you have Dropbox running, it messes with the clipboard. 

This helped me so maybe it will help someone else. I'm not sure if there's a newer version of the Dropbox windows 8 app that doesnt cause this error. but for now I'm just not going to run Dropbox.

I ended up having to uninstall it for the issue to go away.

EDIT: Seems the issue is back. This is getting real frustrating....