Working between Excel and Word
Thread poster: Christopher W Gladden
Christopher W Gladden
Christopher W Gladden  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 20:31
Japanese to English
Aug 29, 2016

Hi,

I have a fairly big project that the client has all laid out in Excel, which I find very cumbersome as a word processing tool. So I was going to just copy and paste between Excel and Word. The problem is that when I paste back into Excel, all formatting is immediately lost (the paste options dialogue doesn't even open). My system's on Word 2016, and their version of Excel is a bit older... don't know if that's involved. Anyway, I don't necessarily HAVE to use Word, but I'd reall
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Hi,

I have a fairly big project that the client has all laid out in Excel, which I find very cumbersome as a word processing tool. So I was going to just copy and paste between Excel and Word. The problem is that when I paste back into Excel, all formatting is immediately lost (the paste options dialogue doesn't even open). My system's on Word 2016, and their version of Excel is a bit older... don't know if that's involved. Anyway, I don't necessarily HAVE to use Word, but I'd really like a way to work and this project making the formatting changes I need to while NOT doing it directly in Excel. Any suggestions?

Thank you!

Chris
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esperantisto
esperantisto  Identity Verified
Local time: 03:31
Member (2006)
English to Russian
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
Paste special? Aug 29, 2016

Try using Paste special (select it from the dropdown menu on the Paste button, it’s for Office 2010, don’t know about the 2016).

 
Elif Baykara Narbay
Elif Baykara Narbay  Identity Verified
Türkiye
Local time: 03:31
German to Turkish
+ ...
A CAT tool? Aug 29, 2016

You have probably considered using a CAT tool, yet I wanted to point it out.

 
Emma Goldsmith
Emma Goldsmith  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 01:31
Member (2004)
Spanish to English
Cat tool seconded Aug 29, 2016

Elif Baykara wrote:

You have probably considered using a CAT tool, yet I wanted to point it out.



Need a like button!


 
Tony M
Tony M
France
Local time: 01:31
Member
French to English
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
What formatting issues? Aug 29, 2016

Christopher W Gladden wrote:
...when I paste back into Excel, all formatting is immediately lost (the paste options dialogue doesn't even open).


Could you be more specific? Exactly WHICH formatting attributes are lost? I'm still using a much odler version of Word / Excel, so I've never experienced this problem. However, there is one very well known issue which has a simple solution: when pasting back from Word into Excel, any manual line returns (NOT ¶!) create suprious extra cells; on a large spreadsheet, this can look alarming!

However, it is easy enough in Word to 'replace all' such line breaks with some unique character combination, and then once safel back in Excel, do the reverse search-&-replace to restore them.

Could this be the main part of your problem, as you don't say exactly what 'formatting' is giving you the headache?


 
Christopher W Gladden
Christopher W Gladden  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 20:31
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks! Aug 30, 2016

Hi, I should have been more specific. I'm not translating directly in Word. The formatting involves colored text that the client wants and doing it in Word should be pretty smooth (SHOULD be (hahaha)). Thank you for all your feedback! Much appreciated.

 


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Working between Excel and Word






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