The Clipboard and drag-and-drop operations require you to encapsulate data into an IDataObject derived class. In part, this demands that you specify the Format of the data encapsulated, represented as string. There are several standard formats that the system understands, such as Dib (device-independent bitmap) and UnicodeText, and static properties are provided that return an appropriate format string to identify them. For more complex situations, there are also two static GetFormat() methods. Both return a Format object, mapping a format identification string to a clipboard format ID (an integer). The string version also registers the specified clipboard format with the OS if it hasn't been registered previously.

public class DataFormats {
// Public Static Fields
   public static readonly string Bitmap;  // =Bitmap
   public static readonly string CommaSeparatedValue;  // =Csv
   public static readonly string Dib;  // =DeviceIndependentBitmap
   public static readonly string Dif;  // =DataInterchangeFormat
   public static readonly string EnhancedMetafile;  // =EnhancedMetafile
   public static readonly string FileDrop;  // =FileDrop
   public static readonly string Html;  // =HTML Format
   public static readonly string Locale;  // =Locale
   public static readonly string MetafilePict;  // =MetaFilePict
   public static readonly string OemText;  // =OEMText
   public static readonly string Palette;  // =Palette
   public static readonly string PenData;  // =PenData
   public static readonly string Riff;  // =RiffAudio
   public static readonly string Rtf;  // =Rich Text Format
   public static readonly string Serializable;  // =WindowsForms10PersistentObject
   public static readonly string StringFormat;  // =System.String
   public static readonly string SymbolicLink;  // =SymbolicLink
   public static readonly string Text;  // =Text
   public static readonly string Tiff;  // =TaggedImageFileFormat
   public static readonly string UnicodeText;  // =UnicodeText
   public static readonly string WaveAudio;  // =WaveAudio
// Public Static Methods
   public static Format GetFormat(int ID);
   public static Format GetFormat(string format);
}