Correctly copy and paste tables from the web into Excel

Mar 04, '04 10:40:00AM

Contributed by: tamc

Every now and again, I want to transfer a table from the web (such as a list of figures from the UN Forestry database) into an Excel worksheet so I can do further calculations. On my previous Windows PC, I could just select the table, copy, and paste into Excel. With my new Mac, I was disappointed to find that copying a table in Safari and pasting it into Excel puts all the data in a single column.

The solution is to use the Firefox browser. This cuts and pastes tables as expected, saving potentially hours of typing or reformatting.

[robg adds: I do quite a bit of this, and Safari definitely doesn't do a good job at it. I decided to test the rest of the browsers that I have lying around, and found that OmniWeb5 Beta (also using Apple's WebCore) and Opera do not paste "correctly," while Camino, Mozilla, iCab, and Internet Explorer paste the data into individual cells in Excel, as one would expect.]

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