Frequent tipster Leonid Nemirovsky passes along a tip about using the Windows XP clipboard manager to get data.

"In the Windows (we use XP service pack 3) Start menu, click on Run. In the field that appears, type CLIPBRD.EXE. In any application, select the desired objects and press Ctrl+C. Once you do this, you will see what you copied in the ClipBook Viewer. From here you can save the clipboard content for future use (using the viewer's pull-down menus) and even send it to another computer, if you know its name."
 
Notes from Cadalyst Tip Patrol: The clipboard is a great way to get non-AutoCAD data into your drawing files, and to pull information out of your CAD files — it works both ways. Copy data from one application, then paste it into another. Or, Copy+Paste from AutoCAD to AutoCAD. My research on this tip found that the ClipBook Viewer is only available in Windows XP, not Windows Vista or Windows 7. The Copy+Paste feature still works in these other versions, but not the viewer. (There are ways to get around this if you don't have XP, but they are beyond the scope of Tips & Tools Weekly.) A nice feature of the viewer is that you can save the copied data as a CLP file for future use.