Allow web pages to access the clipboard

Q When I use the online office suite Zoho I often want to copy and paste text from another document or website into the document.

Every time I try to do this, a message appears asking ‘Do you want to allow this Web page access to your clipboard?'

If you allow this, the web page can access the clipboard and read information you have cut or copied recently.

There are two options, ‘Allow access’ and ‘Don’t allow’. Selecting the Allow access option lets me paste the text but it is annoying to have to do this all the time.

Peter Simms

A This warning was added to Internet Explorer 7 to help protect privacy, and the fact that it gets in the way suggests it is doing its job.

It is possible to allow clipboard access to all websites but we think it is a better idea to take advantage of the security zones to give clipboard access to the sites you decide rather than indiscriminately giving access to every site on the internet.

Start Internet Explorer and go to the web page you want to give access to the clipboard. Click on the Tools icon and then Internet Options.

Click on the Security tab and then on the green tick icon. Click on the Sites button below this section.

The current website should automatically be added to the top text box so click on ‘Add’ to include it in the Trusted Zone.

You may need to click in the box labelled ‘Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone’ so the tick disappears. Click on Close when the site has been added to the bottom box.

Now click on the Custom level button towards the bottom of the Internet Options window.

Scroll down to the option ‘Allow Programmatic clipboard access’ option in the Scripting section, which is towards the bottom of the list. Click on ‘Enable’ and then on OK.

To check that this setting has not been changed for the normal internet zone, click on its icon and then on the Custom level button. Find the clipboard option again and check it is set to Prompt.