2 ways to see and edit your clipboard on Android (2024)

• Your Android's keyboard has a "clipboard" option that lets you see everything you've copied for the last hour.
• Android 13 also adds a "visual clipboard" to your Android phone, so you can see exactly what you've copied.
• If you tap your Android's visual clipboard, you'll also have a chance to edit whatever you've copied.

If your device lets you copy and paste things, then it has a "clipboard," a place where anything you copy gets kept. But most devices don't let you see the clipboard — it just works invisibly in the background.

Android devices don't follow that rule. There are two ways to see your clipboard on an Android phone or tablet, depending on which version of Android you have.

How to see your clipboard on Android using Gboard

Gboard is Google's official keyboard app, and comes preinstalled on most Android phones. It also has a few extra features that regular keyboards don't offer, like clipboard history.

To see your clipboard while using Gboard, just tap the clipboard icon in the keyboard's top row, right next to the settings gear. On the page that opens, tap Turn on Clipboard.

From now on, anything you copy or cut — whether it's text or a picture — will be saved to this menu for an hour. Open it and tap any of the saved items to immediately insert it into wherever you're typing. You can also tap the pencil icon in the corner to delete things from your clipboard history.

You can also customize this Clipboard menu so it holds screenshots you've taken recently too. To turn this on, go back to the regular keyboard and tap the settings gear icon in the top row, then Clipboard, and then Save recent screenshots in clipboard.

How to use the visual clipboard in Android 13

Thanks to the new Android 13 update, Android users can see what's in their clipboard as soon as they copy it, and even edit the clipboard however they want.

To see the visual clipboard, just copy or cut some text. As soon as you save it to the clipboard, a small window will appear in the bottom-left corner showing a preview of whatever you saved.

If you tap the window, a page will open where you can edit what you saved. You can also tap the share icon instead to immediately send whatever you copied/cut with anyone.