Clipboard integration

Clipboard integration is a special technique we developed for foxer currency calculator to be notified when clipboard contents change. We could have made another passive desktop calculator like many others, but we wanted to create something really helpful, and we did. Because Clipboard integration is a unique feature that makes bringing instant conversion pop-ups possible, when the text being copied contains more than 50% of numbers. By relying on this technique, foxer just needs a very easy trigger: copying to the clipboard by pressing CTRL+C.

How does Clipboard integration help?

Let’s suppose you are working on a financial report involving figures from different dates and currencies, and you want to convert every cell of this table into one single currency. Without foxer (and of course, no clipboard integration) you have to go and find a financial source to locate the exchange rate for every date. And repeat the process for every single currency in your report. We are sorry, that is very hard work. With foxer and clipboard integration ON, you just select a table or list of numbers and press CTRL+C, and you have it! The source application you are working on doesn’t matter. You get a fantastic pop-up with all conversions done. Additionally, you can adjust incoming / outgoing currencies and some formatting options from the pop-up window itself. Currency conversion has never been so easy!

Help without interference

With the concept of helping and not disturbing the user in mind, we also set some restrictions and options to avoid undesired pop-ups. First of all, Clipboard integration can be turned ON / OFF from the application’s main menu. Also, a global hotkey can be defined from the configuration window with the same purpose. Finally, foxer application does not react if at least 50% of the contents copied to the clipboard are numbers. So if you expect foxer to appear and this does not happen at all, first please check Clipboard integration is ON, also try to copy more numbers.

Troubleshooting

Depending on the Windows™ version and applications running, the successful behaviour may be affected. If you experience problems or it does not work at all, please try choosing from the following different methods in the Preferences tab:

• The predefined Standard Listener method is the latest implementation introduced by Microsoft in Windows™ Vista and should be ok for most of the systems.
• The original XP Clipboard Viewer implementation is also available, but is prone to being corrupted because it depends on other applications running.
• In addition, we implemented an XP-hardened method that basically recreates the clipboard listener chain and might help in some cases.

In all cases, you should know that pressing the Clear button on the converter window will reset the clipboard integration mechanism.

Clipboard integration and compatibility

Clipboard integration is 100% compatible with Windows™, all of the Microsoft Office Suites and main Internet Browsers, like Chrome, Firefox, EDGE and IE, but unfortunately not all applications are. In particular, we found that OpenOffice & StarOffice suites doesn’t manage clipboard mechanism as defined by Microsoft. You can get more information by clicking on this Paste/Clipboard not working topic.