How do I copy the visible text of a cell?

For me, a single cell appears to copy/paste as regular text into TextEdit or Mail or Word but as a table in Pages. There appears to be no way to simply copy/paste the contents into Pages.

For these kinds of things, I have a small AppleScript that strips all the formatting from whatever is on the clipboard. In this instance it will strip all the formatting that says it is a table. When you Paste, it will be plain text with the cells separated by one or more carriage returns. It also allows you to copy several cells and paste them as plain text, not as a table (it works best on cells that are a contiguous range). I have a few variations of the script, one that converts it to text and also Pastes, versus it being two steps. If you have not used scripts before, it takes a few steps to set everything up. I may miss a step as I describe how to do it; I have to go by memory for some of the things I've done a while ago.

First you'll probably want to set you computer up so the user library is always available, which will make seeing and saving to your Scripts folder easier. It is not required but I don't like it hidden anyway.

1. In Finder, go to your home folder (the one that is probably some variation of your name)
2. In the Finder menu at the top go to View/Show View Options
3. Near the bottom is a checkbox to show the library folder. Check it.

Now get Script Editor set up

1. Open the Script Editor application (start typing the name in spotlight, that's the fastest way to find it).
2. New Document
3. Make the script folder show up on the menu bar. Open the preferences for Script Editor and select the checkbox to show the scripts menu. An "S" like symbol should appear on the right side of your menu bar.
4. In that menu, click on "Open Scripts Folder" then "Open User Scripts Folder". I believe this will create the user Scripts folder if it was not there already.

Now create the script in the new document in Script Editor

1. Paste in the script from below. It is just one line.
2. Try it out. Copy a Numbers cell, click the Run button in the script editor, Paste into Pages and see if it worked.
3. Save the script with a name like "Clipboard as Text". I save scripts to a folder I created in my Documents folder but the place they need to be for using them is in either the Library/Scripts folder or your username/Library/Scripts folder. I copy them there afterward. If you use your own user Scripts folder, your scripts show up at the bottom of the list in the menu.

If this script is something you use a lot, you can create a "service" from it and assign a keyboard shortcut to it. That's another bunch of steps.

Clipboard to Text script:

set the clipboard to (the clipboard) as text

Another way would be to select the cell in Numbers, command-c to copy, click in a Text Box (in either Pages or Numbers), and command-v to paste.

Then select and copy-paste the text from the Text Box to wherever you need it.

SG

If you want to quickly try it out, you can skip to the last part where you put the script into Script Editor and run it.