Pasting paragraph from Word into a single cell in Excel - doesn't work
I just want to copy a paragraph of text into Excel, and want Excel autosize this (i.e. to expand the cell to fit). Instead, it runs into multiple cells. Also, even when i copy and paste the errant parts back into the cell I want it in (such a hassle!) it only shows the top half of the paragraph in the cell, not all of it.
I have looked elsewhere on this site, and there does not appear to be any solution?
Weird.
12 Answers
It's a very odd thing, but when you paste something like this in Excel and it fills out multiple lines for a piece of text that is one entity (your paragraph is a single entity for this purpose... if you copied three paragraphs, you SHOULD expect it to end up in three cells), Excel's Text to Columns wizard is at the root of the problem.
(I will make a note here, that with formatted HTML data, Excel will paste the formatting material on one line and the textual material on the line underneath. This seems to be its designed approach and is not affected by the below. However, using the F2-Edit approach mentioned further down, you CAN paste only the text into the cell, no formatting string at all.)
To clear the problem up, pick some cell with data in it and open the Text to Column wizard. Make sure Delimited is selected and click Next. Look at the list of delimiters they show. Experience says "Tab" can be checked and things work fine, but the rest need to be unchecked. Of course, that's because one seldom encounters Tabs INSIDE a paragraph so it's usually OK, but one DOES encounter commas and spaces, even semicolons so they will cause the Paste function to break up the data resulting in the multiple lines you encounter. And one might have something else in the "Other" part that could cause trouble. Of course, if Tabs could be in your text, uncheck that as well.
Then click Cancel to quit without tearing that poor cell's data up, and you are good to go.
That's the fix that lasts more than one paste operation. Until one uses the wizard for something and checks any of the boxes. If you only have a single paste, or a couple, and don't want to bother with that, you can copy the material, come back to Excel, then press F2 to enter the cell edit mode and paste the material directly into the formula bar (or whatever, if you use the horrid "edit in the cell" feature...). That will paste it all into the single cell, period, no splitting it between cells possible for Excel.
A final note is that it usually will not change the row height to match the pasted material. It seems to desire to display it off to the right as a single line line covering columns to the right until encountering a filled cell. So it seems to never reach the point where it would even consider changing the row height. Even when you format the cell to "wrap text", it does not seem to engage this thought though it will no longer spill to the right. So basically, it seems like it never conisders the idea and you will have to do this yourself.
(Even then though, you will often encounter a Longstanding Bug™ in which forcing Excel to adjust the row height to match text gives you one to three empty lines worth of space above the text. Literally that, not just sort of nearly a full line, two or three. So you may still have to manually adjust the row height to suit. (Longstanding Bug™ trademark property of Microsoft))
Here is a paragraph in Word
In Word, select paragraph, CTRL-C (or right-click + copy)
In Excel, click in the cell you want it to go in.
- Right click in cell, choose Paste Special, Text. Your paragraph will spread along the row, even though it is actually all in one cell.
Right click the cell, choose Format Cell, Alignment, choose Center, Top, Bottom Distributed, etc, check or tick Wrap Text.
Make the cell height and width as you want by dragging the row & column header edges (you know you can double click these to autosize?)
