I'm a fairly inexperienced Excel user but I've got plenty of experience with Word, Powerpoint, and a whole bunch of computer programs in general. However, a new job's forcing me to use Excel 2013, and it requires a lot of copy-pasting, which means I'm encountering a strange quirk very often: Whenever I copy data from a cell or a range of cells, if I don't paste as the next action Excel acts as though I never copied the data in the first place. For example, if I want to copy A2 to B2, I might copy A2, then decide to write a column header on B1, then when I try to paste to B2 Excel has "forgotten" that I copied A2. However, if I copy A2 and then immediately paste into B2 it works fine. But any action between copying and pasting causes excel to lose the copied data.

Now, in literally every other productivity program I can think of, you can perform actions in between copying and pasting without losing data: I can copy a paragraph in Word, then make some edits elsewhere, and paste the copied text later without problems. It seems strange that a program as powerful and mature as Excel couldn't perform an extremely simple task like holding copied data in memory for more than a single action! I realize there's the Office Clipboard menu, but it's cumbersome to have to click to that every time and it breaks the flow of using the keyboard only, which stinks for larger data sets. There's got to be a setting to make Excel copy-pasting behave as it does in every other program...right?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.