Data Formats
Early implementations of the clipboard stored data as plain text without meta-information such as typeface, type style or color. More recent implementations support the multiple types of data, allowing complex data structures to be stored. These range from styled text formats such as RTF or HTML, through a variety of bitmap and vector image formats to complex data types like spreadsheets and database entries.
For example cutting a range of cells in a spreadsheet and then pasting them into another sheet may preserve the underlying formulae and data, and /,/.may even translate intra-cell references, so that a "SUM(...)" calculation on a sub-range of the cells is converted to refer to the newly pasted copies of those cells.
When data is added to the clipboard by an application, it typically makes it available in as many different data formats as it can. This includes both native and simpler (or more common) formats that would have a higher chance of being recognized by a wide variety of applications. Thus, when data is pasted into another application, the format that is closest to that application's native format can be used, preserving as much of the original data as possible. In Windows in particular, the internal clipboard functionality of the operating system will automatically translate data from known advanced formats to simpler formats (such as RTF to plain text, or Unicode to ANSI Text), increasing the likelihood that any given application can interpret some form of the original datas.
Read more about this topic: Clipboard (computing)
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