How to access and manage your clipboard on Android

If you’re copying and pasting text a lot on Android, it’s handy to know where the clipboard is. Here’s how to find the clipboard on Android.

How to find and edit your clipboard on Android

You can access the clipboard in two ways on Android. Both are described below.

Using Gboard

Gboard is the official clipboard app from Google, and it comes installed by default on many Android phones. To access it, open any text field and tap on the Clipboard Icon at the top of the keyboard before you type anything.

Once you’re inside Gboard, you’ll see any text you have copied. If you want to paste that text into the current text field, tap the text. Tap the Pencil Icon in the upper right-hand corner to pin or delete entries. Alternatively, touch and hold some text to pin it in place. Otherwise, unpinned clips will delete themselves after one hour.

If this is your first time using Gboard, you may have to tap Turn on Clipboard before it becomes active.

To customize the keyboard further, tap the Gear icon > Clipboard. Here, you can choose whether recently copied text and images show up as suggestions, customize if phone numbers and addresses show up in recently copied text, and even enable the saving of screenshots to the clipboard.

Using visual clipboard

Phones running Android 13 get to use the visual clipboard by default. It makes it even easier to see your clipboard. Copy or cut some text, and you will see a small popup showing a preview of this text in the bottom left-hand corner. Tapping on that window lets you edit the clipboard’s contents before pasting it again if you want. This feature works on compatible Pixel phones, but you may not see it on some other models.

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