Help me help Word and Excel play nicely together.
June 10, 2010 12:49 PM Subscribe
I'm trying to paste some text from Excel into Word. Normally when I do this, I select Paste Special > Unformatted Text so my stuff doesn't display as a table. But this time, the Excel text is already formatted with a ton of bold, italics, and underlining, and I don't know how to retain that formatting while still ditching the table. Help?
I'm in the process of indexing a book. I made a list in Word of all the terms that need to go in the index. Every term has some sort of formatting depending on whether it's a title, author, keyword, etc.
I then used Excel to alphabetize the list and now I want to transfer it back to Word. But copying and pasting anything from Excel into Word automatically makes it into a table. Normally I'd get around this by doing a Paste Special and selected Unformatted Text, but that will cause me to lose all my formatting in the process. I just want to lose the table. Anything I can do to achieve this?
(Unfortunately alphabetizing first and then applying the formatting isn't really an option, at least at this point.)
I'm in the process of indexing a book. I made a list in Word of all the terms that need to go in the index. Every term has some sort of formatting depending on whether it's a title, author, keyword, etc.
I then used Excel to alphabetize the list and now I want to transfer it back to Word. But copying and pasting anything from Excel into Word automatically makes it into a table. Normally I'd get around this by doing a Paste Special and selected Unformatted Text, but that will cause me to lose all my formatting in the process. I just want to lose the table. Anything I can do to achieve this?
(Unfortunately alphabetizing first and then applying the formatting isn't really an option, at least at this point.)
Best answer: Paste it as formatted text so you get the table, then go to the Table menu and Select > Table, then (also from the Table menu) Convert > Table to Text, on the next screen, choose separate text with tabs, and you're good to go.
posted by ljshapiro at 12:54 PM on June 10, 2010
posted by ljshapiro at 12:54 PM on June 10, 2010
Best answer: You can let it paste in as a table and the select the table and convert it to (In Word 2003 it's Table->Convert->Table to Text). Should preserve the formatting.
Another way to do this would be to use the Excel data as a basis for a mail merge and do the formatting in Word.
posted by yarrow at 12:54 PM on June 10, 2010
Another way to do this would be to use the Excel data as a basis for a mail merge and do the formatting in Word.
posted by yarrow at 12:54 PM on June 10, 2010
Oh, never mind on the mail merge suggestion, I misread. You have an alphabetized list where the only indication of the type of term is the formatting; I thought you had two columns, one with the type and one with the term. Anyway, the convert table to text thing should be fine.
posted by yarrow at 1:00 PM on June 10, 2010
posted by yarrow at 1:00 PM on June 10, 2010
Response by poster: Thank you so much! I figured it had to be something super easy like that, but I'm on a deadline (OF COURSE) and just couldn't figure out what the right search terms would be in my limited time.
This is in Word 2010, so I highlighted the table, clicked the Layout tab, and "Convert to text" was the second button from the right. All looks correct! Thank you again.
posted by anderjen at 1:05 PM on June 10, 2010
This is in Word 2010, so I highlighted the table, clicked the Layout tab, and "Convert to text" was the second button from the right. All looks correct! Thank you again.
posted by anderjen at 1:05 PM on June 10, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by robabroad at 12:54 PM on June 10, 2010