I'm using Pages 8.2 and Numbers 6.2. I want to copy text from cells in Numbers and paste only the text into a Pages document. So far, all I've managed to do to achieve this is to paste the Numbers data into a Gmail message and use Gmail to strip the formatting. Surely there is a better way?
Mac mini, macOS 10.14
Insert a Pages Text box, and expand it to receive the pasted content from the Numbers spreadsheet. The paste operation cannot open a new table within the Text box, and instead deposits the Numbers cell content as tab separated text. You can now copy/paste this Text box content for use as formatted data elsewhere in the Pages document. You can then use Find/Replace to alter the tabs \t to other characters as needed.
I discussed this in an earlier article, and though the versions discussed are older, it still works in Pages v8.2 and Numbers v6.2, which I just tested in Mojave 10.14.6 (18G1012), since that is what I have booted at the moment.
Insert a Pages Text box, and expand it to receive the pasted content from the Numbers spreadsheet. The paste operation cannot open a new table within the Text box, and instead deposits the Numbers cell content as tab separated text. You can now copy/paste this Text box content for use as formatted data elsewhere in the Pages document. You can then use Find/Replace to alter the tabs \t to other characters as needed.
I discussed this in an earlier article, and though the versions discussed are older, it still works in Pages v8.2 and Numbers v6.2, which I just tested in Mojave 10.14.6 (18G1012), since that is what I have booted at the moment.
You can strip away most of the formatting from within Numbers by using functions such as CLEAN or PLAINTEXT. You can also use CONCATENATE to join the contents of multiple cells together into a single string. Removing unnecessary spaces, substitution, it’s all there if you explore the text functions.
https://www.apple.com/mac/numbers/compatibility/functions.html#text
I’m not sure why PLAINTEXT is missing from the list, but it’s probably the best choice for your purposes. Suppose you have formatted sentenced in A1, A2, and A3, which you want to make into an unformatted paragraph.
A4=PLAINTEXT(CONCATENATE(A1, A2, A3))
Then just copy and paste A4 into Pages.
Hi Xp47jif22,
I see the same thing as you do. If I Paste and Match Style into a TextEdit doc, I get tab delineated text with returns for new rows. If I paste the same table into a textbox in Pages, I get a single column with each cell on its own line. That's no help. Exporting as a CVS or TVS will open as text in Pages but seems like even more work than pasting into TextEdit or Gmail.
I don't see another way to strip the data out of the table.
quinn
Ok, I got it. I tried that before using your earlier article, but the paste just inserted the Numbers table into the Pages doc and the text box disappeared. I experimented more and found that I have to click in the text box to highlight the existing text before I paste. Thanks.
Thank you. I will try to get up to speed on this.
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Numbers to Pages: Is there a way to extract text from a table?
