Copying tables from Word to Excel: strange treatment of separate lines (One cell turns to multiple.)

[JaeDyAy]

Good morning/afternoon/evening MrExcel peeps,

I'm in need of manually copy-pasting a bunch of tables from Word into Excel and haven't gotten very far before encountering a strange error in translation. At least, what it does is a surprise to me and would result in a lot of time added to my task because of formatting.

If I'm selecting a table in word which contains a cell with multiple lines of text, each line become a separate cell when pasted into Excel. I've given my best representation of a before-and-after below; bear in mind that the lower-right cell in the second table is actually merged so that it's three rows tall:

Title	Comments
Something to talk about: (i) I’m the first part (ii) I’m the second part	I’m a general comment

<tbody>
</tbody>

[TABLE="class: grid, width: 195"]
<tbody>[TR]
[TD]Title
[/TD]
[TD]Comments
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Something to talk about:
[/TD]
[TD]I’m a general comment
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD](i) I’m the first part
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD](ii) I’m the second part
[/TD]
[/TR]
</tbody>[/TABLE]

I've tried multiple means of selecting the table and there are only two paste types, where "Match Destination Formatting" contains the same problem alongside extra formatting woes. I've attempted Googling and using MrExcel's Search function for a solution to this problem already, but there are too many words to describe the problem succinctly enough for either approach to be of use.

I would appreciate any advice given either on solving the problem directly (you miracle workers, you) or even just methods you might use to make the process more effecient.

Many thanks,

JaeDyAy

 

[oldbrewer]

I've given my best representation of a before-and-after below; bear in mind that the lower-right cell in the second table is actually merged so that it's three rows tall: the use of lower infers there are two cells on the right yet I can see only one. If you are meaning the cells on the left, the lowest cell contains "ii I'm the second part"

In the word doc are the lines wrapping naturally or are line feed characters in use?

 

[oldbrewer]

I just replicated your problem with a mock up word table =- and SOLVED it by making the table column so wide that no text wrapped, if you need the word text to wrap then you will need to run a macro in excel to copy cell 2 and put it into cell 1 and the same for cell 3 - clumsy maybe but you achieve your aim.

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

This may help you:

Retain multi-line cells when pasting Word table into Excel - Microsoft Community