Clipboard Format Spy

Clipboard Format Spy is an application that shows the formats recorded by your Clipboard. It monitors your clips and updates the formats accordingly, thus giving you the possibility to find out codes, descriptions and sizes.

After a fast setup operation that shouldn't give you any trouble, you're greeted by a user-friendly interface made from a standard window with a plain and simple layout, where you can get started by copying something to the Clipboard.

As previously mentioned, Clipboard Format Spy has a live monitor and automatically updates the formats corresponding to each clip. The code is written in hexadecimal format and represents the clip's identifier, the description shows symbolic constants for the Windows standard Clipboard formats, while the clip's data size is obtained from the global memory.

It's possible to sort information by any of these three columns, double-click an entry to view the full text (word wrapping is enabled by default), along with details about the clip version, context, fragment, selection and source URL, or the full path, date of modification and attributes for copied files or folders, for example.

You can view information in binary mode. Apart from the fact that you can clear all data, there are no other notable aspects. Unfortunately, the app doesn't implement an option for exporting all information to file.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't put a strain on the machine's performance in our evaluation, running on a low amount of CPU and RAM. It worked smoothly, without triggering the operating system to hang, crash or prompt error messages.

Although it could have integrated additional options and customization preferences, Clipboard Format Spy offers a straightforward solution for studying the formats of any kind of copied content, such as text, URLs, graphics, files and folders.