What Is PowerToys and Where Can You Get It?

PowerToys is Microsoft's open-source collection of utilities designed to enhance productivity for Windows power users.

This comprehensive toolkit offers more than 25 free utilities, including FancyZones for window management, PowerToys Run for quick application launching, Color Picker for design work, and PowerRename for batch file operations.

You can download PowerToys from the Microsoft Store or GitHub.

What Is Advanced Paste in PowerToys?

Advanced Paste is PowerToys' flagship clipboard management utility that revolutionizes the traditional copy-and-paste workflow.

In our previous guides, we explored Advanced Paste's fundamental capabilities for clipboard management:

• Convert Clipboard Content into Plain Text, JSON, or Markdown with a Few Clicks demonstrated how Advanced Paste transforms clipboard content into various text formats using simple keyboard shortcuts.
• How to Paste From Clipboard Into a File With PowerToys showed how to save clipboard content directly as files in different formats including .txt, .html, and .png.

Advanced Paste and AI

Advanced Paste now includes powerful AI features that leverage OpenAI's language models to intelligently transform clipboard content. These capabilities extend beyond simple format conversion to include translation, summarization, code generation, and style transformation.

Our article on the evolution of Advanced Paste details how Janea Systems extended PowerToys with generative AI technology – most notably Semantic Kernel for multimodal capabilities.

What You Will Learn In This Guide

This guide will walk you through setting up and using AI-powered features in Advanced Paste so you can ramp up productivity in your daily tasks.

First Things First: Obtain Your OpenAI API Key

AI features in Advanced Paste require access to OpenAI's API. You can get it by generating a secret API key, which enables integration between PowerToys and OpenAI's language models for intelligent clipboard transformations.

Assuming you have an account with OpenAI, follow these steps to create your API key:

1. Navigate to https://platform.openai.com/api-keys and click "Create new secret key" (Figure 1).  

Fig. 1: Creating a new secret key to OpenAI’s API

2. In the next step, provide a descriptive name for your key and click "Create secret key" (Figure 2).  

Fig. 2: The “Create new secret key” dialog.

3. The next dialog will display your unique, auto-generated API key. Copy it and save to a secure location.
Once that dialog closes, you won’t be able to view the key through the OpenAI platform again.

Remember to keep your key safe. Anyone who has it can access OpenAI’s API on your behalf, which may result in charges for token use.

If at any point you suspect the secret key has been compromised, delete it from the list in the Settings on OpenAI’s Platform (Figure 3).

Fig. 3: List of active API keys; delete a key by clicking on the red trash icon next to it.

Once you revoke a key, it can no longer be used or recovered. You will need to generate another and update it anywhere you used the previous one to keep API access.

Save On Usage: Get Complimentary Tokens

By default, users who access large language models through API are charged for token use.

However, OpenAI offers complimentary tokens to those who agree to share their inputs and outputs for model improvement. This arrangement allows you to test AI features without immediate charges.

Access the complimentary tokens by following these steps (illustrated below in Figure 4):

1. Go to OpenAI's Platform and navigate to Settings by clicking the cogwheel icon in the top right corner.
2. Select "Data Controls" in the left pane.
3. Switch to the "Sharing" tab in the main area.
4. Enable "Share inputs and outputs with OpenAI". You can do this for all projects or only selected projects, assuming you have created some beforehand.
5. Click "Save".
6. You will see a dialog box with the Content Sharing Agreement. You must accept the agreement to receive complimentary tokens. Read through the agreement, check the consent box, and click "Submit" to finalize your preferences.

Fig. 4: Granting OpenAI permission to use my inputs and outputs for model improvement in exchange for a daily token allowance.

This grants you up to 250 thousand tokens per day across the following models: gpt-5, gpt-5-codex, gpt-5-chat-latest, gpt-4.1, gpt-4o, o1 and o3; and up to 2.5 million tokens per day across gpt-5-mini, gpt-5-nano, gpt-4.1-mini, gpt-4.1-nano, gpt-4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o4-mini, and codex-mini-latest.

Usage beyond these limits, as well as for other models, will be billed at standard rates.

Activate AI Features in Advanced Paste

Once you have obtained your OpenAI API key, you can enable AI functionality within Advanced Paste.

Configure AI features by following these steps:

1. Open PowerToys and navigate to "System Tools" > "Advanced Paste" in the left pane. Make sure the "Enable Advanced Paste" toggle is on and click "Enable" next to “Enable Paste with AI” (Figure 5).  

Fig. 5: To turn on AI features in Advanced Paste, click “Enable” next to “Enable Paste with AI”.

2. In the next dialog box, paste your OpenAI API key into the provided field and click "Save".

3. The AI features are now active and ready for use with your clipboard content.  (Figure 6).  

Fig. 6: All AI features in Advanced Paste are active.

See It Before You Apply It: Custom Format Preview

Custom Format Preview is a useful feature that makes Advanced Paste preview the AI output before pasting. You can activate the feature in the Behavior section of the Advanced Paste settings (Figure 7).

Fig. 7: Custom Format Preview (bottom) is active.

Paste Text with AI

The basic AI-powered features in Advanced Paste work exclusively with text. You can type simple prompts to manipulate clipboard content in sophisticated ways, including translating, summarizing, adjusting tone, and converting between formats.

Use AI pasting by following these steps (illustrated in Figure 8):

1. Copy any text content to your clipboard.
2. Navigate to the document or application where you want to paste the transformed text.
3. Press Win+Shift+V to open the Advanced Paste window.
4. In the text bar at the top of the Advanced Paste window, describe what you want the AI to do with the clipboard content. For example: "Translate into English," "Summarize," or "Rewrite as Shakespeare".
5. The AI will process your request. If you have Custom Format Preview enabled, Advanced Paste will display the transformed output for review before pasting.
6. Click "Paste" to insert the AI-generated content into your target destination.

Fig. 8: Pasting text with AI in Advanced Paste. Here, we copy a paragraph written in Polish and use Advanced Paste to translate it into English and the output into a text editor.

Note: Remember to Use Complete Prompts

If your prompt is incomplete (such as "Translate" without specifying the target language), too ambiguous, or asks for things AI can’t yet do, the Advanced Paste window will display an error message and halt (Figure 9). 

Fig. 9: The Advanced Paste window displays an error message due to an incomplete prompt.

When an error like this occurs, you can click on the blue information icon to open a tooltip with the error message (Figure 10).

Fig. 10: In case of an error, click on the blue information icon to activate a tooltip with a message explaining the error.

To prevent similar errors, provide sufficient context and specificity in your instructions. Complete prompts like "Translate to French," "Summarize in bullet points," or "Convert to professional tone" will yield the best results.

Custom Actions: Store Frequent Prompts For Quick Reuse

You can store frequently used prompts as presets and activate them directly from within the Advanced Paste window or with custom keyboard shortcuts.

Save a prompt for later by following these steps:

1. In PowerToys settings, go to System Tools -> Advanced Paste in the left pane, scroll down the main window to the Actions section and select the “Add custom action” button (Figure 11).  

Fig. 11: Adding custom actions in Advanced Paste in PowerToys.

2. In the next window, type the action's name, the prompt you want to store, and click “Save” (Figure 12).  

Fig. 12: Configuring custom actions in Advanced Paste.

3. The action will immediately appear as a new item at the bottom of the section, and you will be able to assign a keyboard shortcut to it (Figure 13).  

Fig. 13: Custom actions listed in Advanced Paste settings.

From now on, every time you invoke the Advanced Paste window with Win+Shift+V, you’ll see the custom action on the list (Figure 14).

Fig. 14: Custom actions available in the Advanced Paste window.

Alternatively, you can activate the prompt with a keyboard shortcut if you have assigned one to it. 

Beyond Text: Paste with Advanced AI

Janea Systems leveraged Semantic Kernel - an SDK from Microsoft for building AI agents - to introduce multimodal AI functionality to Advanced Paste.

The advanced AI feature enables Advanced Paste to work with non-text input such as images, produce non-text output like files, and chain multiple actions together in a sequence. For example, it can extract text from an image, convert that text to JSON format, and save the JSON as a .txt file in a single operation.

We’ll illustrate how to use this multimodality and apply a string of AI actions to non-text clipboard content by going through the process of copying an image and prompting AI to manipulate it in several ways:

1. Select an image that contains legible text and copy it to clipboard. You can also copy it with the Windows Snipping Tool, using the keyboard shortcut Win+Shift+S (Figure 15).  

Fig. 15: Copying an image to clipboard for advanced image processing. For this step, I chose a Polish-language poster by Loesje and copied it with the Windows Snipping Tool.

2. Navigate to your chosen destination. This can be either a document for direct pasting, or a folder for file creation. Once there, press Win+Shift+V to open the Advanced Paste window.

3. In the text bar at the top of the Advanced Paste window, describe your multistep process as a single sequence. For example, the prompt can read: "Extract, translate to English, paste to disk".

4. The system will execute these actions in order and provide the final output (Figure 16).  

Fig. 16: After prompting Advanced Paste to extract text from the image, translate it into English, and save it to disk, I open the file to see the output.

Janea Systems and PowerToys

Janea Systems played a crucial role in developing PowerToys' modern iteration, contributing to its revival as an open-source project that serves millions of Windows users worldwide.

Read our case study for more details on our role and contributions.

If you’re interested in learning more about PowerToys and open-source development, explore our comprehensive interviews with Jaime Bernardo, Janea Systems’ Lead Software Engineer and PowerToys maintainer:

• The first interview covers the ins and outs of PowerToys development.
• The second focuses on general open source insights around enterprise adoption.

Our commitment to open source doesn’t end with PowerToys, though.

JECQ: Janea Systems’ Open-Source Vector Compression

JECQ – short for “Just Enough Compression & Quantization” – is our in-house project for intelligent, in-memory vector compression.

Built from the ground up in Janea Systems’ R&D labs, JECQ is an advanced C++ library for FAISS users that achieves a 6x compression ratio while maintaining 85% accuracy in vector quantization.

Intrigued? Read more in our case study and visit JECQ’s GitHub page.

Bring the Power of Open Source to Your Business With Janea Systems

Curious if and how your organization can leverage the power of community-driven development? Let’s discuss how we can help you achieve your goals through proven open-source methodologies and expertise.