Pastely

free tool · no sign-up · runs in your browser

Clipboard viewer

When you copy, apps put several versions on the clipboard at once: plain text, rich HTML, sometimes an image or a file. The app you paste into picks the one it likes best, which is why the same copy looks different in different places. Press ⌘V (or Ctrl-V) on this page to see every version.

your clipboard

Press ⌘V anywhere on this page

copy something first: text from a web page, cells from a spreadsheet, a screenshot.

Free to embed. Put this clipboard viewer on your blog, docs or class page.

What's on your clipboard after a copy

You copy fromFormats on the clipboard
A web pagetext/plain, text/html
Google Sheets or Excel cellstext/plain (tab-separated), text/html (a table)
A screenshot (⌃⇧⌘4)image/png
A link in the address bartext/plain, text/uri-list
Word or Pagestext/plain, text/html, plus RTF that browsers hide

Why the HTML is so big

Copy one sentence from a web page and the HTML version often runs to several kilobytes: every style, class and span comes with it. That's the formatting a normal paste brings into your document. Paste as plain text to leave it behind.

Clipboard Viewer: questions

How do I see what's on my clipboard on a Mac?+

In Finder, choose Edit › Show Clipboard to see the plain text or image. It shows only one format. This viewer shows every format the browser can read, including the HTML. In macOS Tahoe 26, Spotlight also keeps a history of what you copied: open Spotlight and press ⌘4.

Why does pasted text look different in different apps?+

The clipboard holds the same copy in several formats. A word processor takes the rich HTML version with fonts and colours, a code editor takes plain text, and a chat app may take something in between.

Does the clipboard viewer save or upload what I paste?+

No. It only reads the clipboard when you paste on this page, and everything stays in your browser.

Why can't I see every format?+

Browsers only hand web pages a few safe formats: plain text, HTML, URLs, images and files. Private formats apps use to talk to each other, like Excel's own cell data, are hidden from web pages.

More free tools

Paste as Plain Text

Strip fonts, colours and links from copied text, and the invisible characters too.

Remove Line Breaks

Fix text copied from a PDF: join broken lines back into paragraphs.

Case Converter

UPPER, lower, Title, Sentence, camelCase, snake_case and more in one click.

Word Counter

Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time as you type.

JSON Formatter

Format, validate and minify JSON, and fix trailing commas and single quotes.

Markdown Table Generator

Paste cells from Excel, Google Sheets or a CSV and get a Markdown, HTML or JSON table.

Remove Duplicate Lines

Dedupe, sort, trim and clean up any list in one paste.

Mac Copy & Paste Shortcuts

Every copy, paste and screenshot shortcut on a Mac, searchable.