Excel copy/paste to Pages looses formatting

Workaround: Paste the cells back into Excel itself first.

Copy the cells.
Press <esc> (to disable the walking ants around the copied cells).
Choose Paste Special > Picture.
Copy the picture.
Paste into Pages.

I believe in the manual it suggests saving the Excel cell range as a PDFF and then inserting that into the Pages document as well. As long as everything is static and does not have to be changed, this will work.

The copy/paste as special does prevent the uneccessary saving of an additional file, though, which can save a lot of confusion as the number of saved files grows.

I believe in the manual it suggests saving the Excel cell range as a PDF and then inserting that into the Pages document as well. As long as everything is static and does not have to be changed, this will work.

The copy/paste as special does prevent the uneccessary saving of an additional file, though, which can save a lot of confusion as the number of saved files grows.

Another workaround:

Copy the cells in Excel.

Goto Preview.app, choose File->New from Pasteboard (command-N).
Copy into clipboard (command-C).

Paste into Pages.
You can then discard the content in Preview.

Preview's (3.0.1) ability to insert "New from Pasteboard" can be used to save the content of the clipboard as image in several formats. You can even select and copy into clipboard parts of the image in Preview to use the parts in other applications.

Another faster way to do this:

This step only needs to be done once: In Excel add the Camera tool to the toolbar (Tools > Customize > Toolbar, then select Commands tab, on the left, choose Tools, then on right scroll to bottom and choose "camera" and drag it onto the toolbar wherever you want. Click OK).

In Excel, select the range of cells, and click the camera button on the toolbar, and click in Excel (it will place a picture there - if you skip this step, it will not retain the formatting). Then go to Pages and paste. You will get the image exactly as it is in Excel.

shades7,

sorry, this doesn't work for me with Excel:mac v.X.

I can drag the camera symbol to the toolbar but then it stays gray regardless what cells I mark.

Anyway, I'm quite happy with the procedure I described above since I can use the "Preview way" with several applications (iWork, Office, Textedit, etc.).