High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The clipboard is a software facility that can be used for short-term data storage and/or data transfer between documents or applications, via copy and paste operations. It is most commonly a part of a GUI environment and is usually implemented as an anonymous, temporary block of memory that can be accessed from most or all programs within the environment via defined programming interfaces. A typical application accesses clipboard functionality by mapping user input (keybindings, menu selections, etc.) to these interfaces.