Today is the eighteenth day of Diduary. You can see links to all of the published articles in the series here.

If you’re not aware of today’s tip, don’t feel bad. Natively, Windows only has the one clipboard. You copy something to it, and you erase the thing you previously copied to it. Simple as that. There are plenty of utilities that will expand that functionality for you, but if you’re running Visual Studio, you’ve already got it.

There’s not much of a screenshot I can show you here. This is probably better suited for a quick video, but I don’t have the capabilities to make that happen in short order either. So, follow my steps, and prepare to be amazed.

1. Copy a few things to your clipboard

Do it the way you normally would. I use Ctrl + C, but you can always highlight and right-click, or even go so far as to use the command from the Edit menu. Just go ahead and copy 4 or 5 things to the clipboard.

2. Cycle through those items in the “clipboard ring”

Instead of Ctrl + V to paste your text, however, you use a slightly modified version of it. The keystrokes to cycle through the clipboard ring are:

Ctrl + Shift + V

Give that a try. Hit it more than once. You’ll see that Visual Studio cycles through the items that you just copied. You can also access this from the Edit menu, of you’d prefer.