Text Pasting Problems

[dmwesq]

I am trying to paste text from Word into Excel. I have copied the text
into a single cell, and am then breaking it apart and pasting into the
appropriate columns. At first this was working fine, but now it is
spreading the text across multiple columns, forcing me to use the
import text wizard for each operation with more than a single word. I
can't seem to find a way to set a preference so that it automatically
treats each group of words without delimiters such as spaces and
commas. Help please!

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I am trying to paste text from Word into Excel. I have copied the text
into a single cell, and am then breaking it apart and pasting into the
appropriate columns. At first this was working fine, but now it is
spreading the text across multiple columns, forcing me to use the
import text wizard for each operation with more than a single word. I
can't seem to find a way to set a preference so that it automatically
treats each group of words without delimiters such as spaces and
commas. Help please!

One way:

Double-click the cell to enter edit mode, or click in the Formula Bar
before pasting.

 

[dmwesq]

Thanks for the tip - it's a good workaround, but I'd still like to know
why it started doing this in the middle of my project and how to reset
things so it stops doing it.

 

[Patrick McMillan [MSFT]]

Hi,

There's no setting in Excel to force text to paste into a single cell if it
contains certain characters, like tabs and paragraph marks. In your case, I
believe the reason you started to see the text begin to paste across
multiple columns was because of the existence of such characters in the
original Word document.

The only other suggestion I would have here would be to, prior to copying
the text in Word, do a find/replace of the text in Word and replace all
paragraph marks and tabs with nonbreaking spaces. This would ensure that the
text would all be pasted into the selected cell in Excel.

Thanks

Thanks for the tip - it's a good workaround, but I'd still like to know
why it started doing this in the middle of my project and how to reset
things so it stops doing it.

--
Pat McMillan
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corp.

This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.