Show the Mac’s Clipboard in a Window

View what is in the Clipboard by opening it in a window on the Mac.

Did you know you could view the clipboard, or the contents of what you last copied, in a window on the Mac? When your in the Finder, just select Show Clipboard under the Edit menu, a new window will open with the clipboard contents. See how to view the clipboard contents in this video for the Mac.

Video TranscriptIn this video, we’re going to look at how we can show our clipboard on the Mac. When we copy something on the Mac, what it does is it puts it into a clipboard. And then what you’re able to do is pay, set into another application or another document where you can see what is in that clipboard. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s go and add something to my clipboard. How do we do that? Well, all we have to do is just go up under Edit here, and then we can copy something. So now what I’m going to do is open up Safari and then I’m going to copy a URL. So now I just go down to Safari, and we have my URL here, my site, I want to copy this. Maybe I want to send it to someone. So all I need to do is just select it here. We can see that it is selected and now I just go command C or what I do is I go up under Edit and I Copy it. We can also see we have here command C for our keyboard shortcut. So I’m going to copy this command. I just copied that.

Now what I am able to do is paste that into another document. All I have to do is just go open up my other document. I go up under Edit, and then we go over to Paste.

But let’s say I wanted to see what was in that clipboard. I forgot what I copied. So before I paste anything, I would like to show that clipboard, I want to see what is in that clipboard. Well, when we’re in the Finder, click on my desktop here. We need to be in our Finder here.

When we’re in our Finder, what we can do is go up under Edit, and you’re going to see an option Show Clipboard. All I have to do is just select this. We’re going to get a new window that opens up and I can see what is in my clipboard. So if I were to copy something else, what it would do is it would replace what is in this clipboard here, would replace Dan’s Tutorials with something else, and I’d be able to see that.

Let’s go back over to Safari here. Let’s go to CNN, and this works within any app, I’m just using Safari as an example. So now I’m looking at CNN. I want to copy this. I select it, and then I go command C. What do you think we’re going to see in that clip board? Well, let’s go hide Safari here. You’re going to see it says CNN. It replaced what I had in my clipboard with what I recently copied.

So that’s how we can view what is in our clipboard on the Mac. All we have to do is just go to our Finder, we do have to be in the Finder, and then under Edit in the menu bar, you’re going to see Show Clipboard. Just select Show Clipboard, a new one will open up and you’ll be able to see what is in your clipboard, basically what you copied last.

So that’s how you can see what is in your clipboard on the Mac.