Paste from text report keeping columns

  • Thread starter Thread starter ClarkD
  • Start date Start date
C

ClarkD

I need to paste small blurbs of selected text from on-screen reports into
Excel. These reports do have any formatting to represent the columns other
than spaces to cause it to appear to be in columns. When I paste to excel,
all of the data from each row is combined into a single cell rather than
pasting as unique columns. I can select each column from the report and
past them one at a time but that is slow.

I know that I can open these whole reports in Excel and align the columns by
importing. That is rather cumbersome for what I need to do. I've also
used Monarch in the past to massage such data. But for this particular
task, some sort of "smart" paste command in Excel would *really* help save
time.

Is there some sort of paste command that will let me take small boxes of
copied text of say 6 rows with 5 columns of non-formatted ASCII data (uses
spaces to define columns) and paste that to Excel and have Excel recognize
that it should be columnized data?

I hope my explanation works. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Clark
 
Clark

After pasting select the column with the text go to Data>Text to Columns.

Specify "delimited" and check "space" as delimiter. Make sure you have enough
empty columns to the right so you don't overwrite data.

Record a macro while doing this so's you can automate the steps. Could be
automated all the way from copy through paste and Text to Columns.

Gord Dibben Excel MVP - XL97 SR2 & XL2002
 
Back
Top