Merged Cells when copying a table from Word to Excel

[jay]

Hi,
I am using Excel 2008, and I am trying to copy a table from Word to Excel.
The table in Word contains 3 columns and about 3000 rows. In each of the row,
the 3rd column contains a big block of text, with some newline characters in
it.
I want to port this table to excel so that I can do sort, filter and take
counts based on the different values in the first 2 columns.

My problem is that, when I copy this table and paste it in excel, the 3rd
column value actually get pasted as multiple rows, while the corresponding
entries in col1 and col2 get pasted as merged cells. Now, I cannot sort or
filter because the merged cells are of uneven sizes. If I unmerge the cells,
I do not have 1-1 mapping between the entries in col1 and col3.

Is there a way, when I paste these values in excel, the entire block of text
in Col3 get pasted in a single cell. Or is there something that I can do in
Word to remove the newline characters.

Any help will be very much appreciated.

Thanks
Jay

 

[willy]

I had a doodle on this for about 10 mins, I have Word XP and the "replace"
command in Word seems very similar to that in Excel

In the word doc REPLACE should be at the end of the HOME ribbon , in the
FIND WHAT dialog, go to the bottom and open the MORE options and insert the
special character for the paragraph mark, note there is also a paragraph
character. Then put some other character such as a non breaking space in the
replace with dialog. Then paste as text the modified table into Excel.

Turning on the display of the non printing characters might help you find
the culprit in your table.

Cheers Willy