TOAD - Cannot open Clipboard

I have recently upgraded from TOAD 7.3 to TOAD 8.0. For those that aren’t aware of TOAD it is a tool by Quest Software designed to make database and application development and administration tasks faster and easier.

Since the upgrade I have been getting an annoying, but rather amusing error.

In order to test and prove the data is correct I often extract the data from the various databases and use excel to do a row-by-row comparison. TOAD has a nice feature whereby you can save the results of a query in various formats. My preferred way of working is to save the data to the clipboard and then paste it into the excel spreadsheet. Fairly frequently during this process I get the below error.

I don’t think there is a pattern to the error, and I haven’t been able to find steps to reproduce it, but I get this error a handful of times a day. I find the best thing to do (although it doesn’t always work) is to open another program, copy and paste something, and then return back to TOAD and try again. If this fails, a restart of TOAD seems to do the trick – that’s the annoying part. The amusing part is this:

If you look again at the error message you notice there are two buttons. The first “OK”, nothing odd in that, however the second raises a smile every time I see it. Don’t forget this error (as reported by TOAD) happens when TOAD is unable to open the clipboard. Needless to say the Clipboard button seems a little out of place. When the button is clicked the message “Cannot Open clipboard” is put on the clipboard, allowing you to paste the message to your hearts content.

Sad maybe, but it still makes me smile, and after a long running query has finally finished only for TOAD to refuse to copy the data, that smile is about all that stops me screaming.

If anyone has found a satisfactory work around, I would love to hear from you.

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