After converting csv file cell cannot be copied!?

Mac OS 10.13.6


Numbers 6.1




Hi and good day,






Usually in Numbers when selecting a cell and copying in, the text inside the cell is also copied.






After converting a csv file to Numbers the cell entries (short text) were displayed alright, it was also possible to sort the cells as usual, BUT…




… I cannot copy the cell content* after selecting it, clipboard empty


The only thing which is copied are some dashes - is this a rest from cell borders?


*(I can only copy the cell content if I manually select the whole text from side to side.


This doesn’t help if there are over 300 rows/ cells.)


Also, after having saved the Numbers file and then reopened it, the entries were gone except for some things which looked like dashes!!


Also before that, I observed that when using Find & Replace, then selecting the Replace field, the upper Find field appeared empty, although the action could be done.


Clicking in the Find field again, the text appeared again.



What’s going on here?


/


Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!




/

with best regards, Omar KN, Stockholm, Sweden



iMac 27", macOS 10.13

Posted on Jan 6, 2020 5:53 AM

Reply

Similar questions

7 replies

Jan 7, 2020 11:46 PM in response to oktan

That extra bit of text above the headers (highlighted here) seems to be confusing Numbers. What seems to work best on my end is in Safari just select the tabular data not including that extra bit above, and copy-paste into a Numbers table.




You can also save to .txt or .csv and open that with Numbers but on my machine Numbers inserts extra "" around the values. The copy-paste is working best here.


SG

Jan 8, 2020 12:24 AM in response to SGIII

Thank you, SG.


Finally I got a workable table in Numbers.


First I opened the csv file in BBEdit,

there I replaced those "Top-down: ? marks" , which when copied/ pasted into the Search field appeared as: \x{00}


The thus cleaned text could be pasted into Numbers!


So far so good!


/

with best regards, Omar KN, Stockholm, Sweden

Jan 7, 2020 5:42 AM in response to SGIII

Also in this screenshot (https://d.pr/free/i/VJrB7B):


On top as it appears in BBEDIT after BBEDIT had opened the csv file.


Then below in the FIND field what was pasted from BBEDIT, the word is: ”Encrypted”


https://d.pr/free/i/VJrB7B


I'm not sure Numbers is able to keep this data, even if it can convert the file initially, (as mentioned above).


/

with best regards, Omar KN, Stockholm, Sweden

Jan 7, 2020 2:07 AM in response to SGIII

Hi and good day SGIII,


A few lines of the csv when copied from BBEDIT


,"***Encrypted Search***","https://www.livingislam.org/_mbl/sis_e.html","","",""

"2020-01-06","09:57:38","www.google.com","***Encrypted Search***","https://www.livingislam.org/sis_e.html","","",""

"2020-01-06","09:56:15","www.google.com","***Encrypted Search***","https://www.livingislam.org/o/scht_e.html","","",""

"2020-01-06","09:51:48","www.google.com","***Encrypted Search***","https://www.livingislam.org/_mbl/sis_e.html","","",""

"2020-01-06","09:51:38","www.google.com.au","***Encrypted Search***","https://www.livingislam.org/nafs.html","","",""

"2020-01-06","09:49:45","www.google.com","***Encrypted


Inside BBEDIT it looked more like this


?E?n?c? = every other letter had a ?-mark.


NB: After exporting it to Numbers, then saving it, later opening it nothing is left there, only a few dashes!


These are Keyword search result from our homepage,

after opening those in Numbers, see how it looks:


https://d.pr/free/i/cGI4jU


/

with best regards, Omar KN, Stockholm, Sweden



Jan 7, 2020 11:13 AM in response to SGIII

>All the data was there as expected.




Yes for me too, ok.


When I copy this textstring (above, after the line: A few lines of the csv when copied from BBEDIT) 


I’ll get a perfect Numbers representation of it.




So Safari does some cleaning here.




Otherwise if I open the csv with BBEdit, then copy the text into a Numbers file, it first looks ok, like this


https://d.pr/free/i/sK341B




then I save the Numbers file, when I reopen it it is empty:


https://d.pr/free/i/B52CIk






Also for the file name I *copied* the words ”Recent Keywords Activity” and with this in the clipboard - and pasted into Numbers file name field,


I  COULD NOT save the file at all, except when I have rewritten the filename by myself, letter for letter - so there is something fishy in the original csv text.




If this cannot be solved, it’s not the end of the world.




For you or anyone to test this I’ll upload the original csv file onto Dropbox here:


feel free to test it!


Please see the Dropbox link: http://bit.ly/2s4xtl5




/


with best regards, Omar KN, Stockholm, Sweden

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

After converting csv file cell cannot be copied!?

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.