Clipboard is used by many applications like word formatters and word processors as a temporary repository for data. The most obvious example is Cut, Copy and Paste. It is also useful for transferring data from one application to another, because the Clipboard is common across applications (processes). When data is added to the Clipboard, the data format can be specified so that other applications can recognize the format and decide to process it or not.

In .NET, the functionalities for playing with Windows system clipboard has been clubbed into the class Clipboard. To add data to Clipboard SetDataObject method of Clipboard class can be used. You can pass any object to this method, but to add data in multiple formats, you must first add the data to a DataObject which is generic, even though there are specific data objects for specific formats.