Hi. When I copy and paste many lines of text from TextEdit (⌘A ⌘C) to Numbers spreadsheet (select the first cell of the column then ⌘V) they are pasted not properly. So how do I paste them into one column (A) properly? What am I doing wrong??
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.2
Because your text includes several lines (new line characters or carriage returns), Numbers is "importing" it as "table data". Numbers has chosen to delimit it (separate it into columns) based on "fixed width". If you look at the resulting text in each column, it is roughly the same width in each column.
When you paste into Numbers, a little oval window should pop up saying "Table data was imported" and "Adjust settings". Click on "Adjust settings" to bring up a window with the settings. Then click on the tab labeled "Delimited" to get away from it being fixed width. Then click on whatever character(s) is/are highlighted on the line "Separate values using:" so no delimiters are selected. Last, click on "Update Table". That should import the data into cells in one column.
I am not a big fan of this feature of Numbers. It tries to be too smart and, as a result, causes a lot of problems. Unfortunately it cannot be turned off and there are some things that cannot be copy/pasted or imported properly into Numbers no matter how hard one tries (it will incorrectly reformat and alter some data no matter what you do). It should do your text correctly, though, but you will likely have to adjust the settings each time.
Because your text includes several lines (new line characters or carriage returns), Numbers is "importing" it as "table data". Numbers has chosen to delimit it (separate it into columns) based on "fixed width". If you look at the resulting text in each column, it is roughly the same width in each column.
When you paste into Numbers, a little oval window should pop up saying "Table data was imported" and "Adjust settings". Click on "Adjust settings" to bring up a window with the settings. Then click on the tab labeled "Delimited" to get away from it being fixed width. Then click on whatever character(s) is/are highlighted on the line "Separate values using:" so no delimiters are selected. Last, click on "Update Table". That should import the data into cells in one column.
I am not a big fan of this feature of Numbers. It tries to be too smart and, as a result, causes a lot of problems. Unfortunately it cannot be turned off and there are some things that cannot be copy/pasted or imported properly into Numbers no matter how hard one tries (it will incorrectly reformat and alter some data no matter what you do). It should do your text correctly, though, but you will likely have to adjust the settings each time.
When dealing with plain text, Numbers will recognize a specified character (default is the comma ( , ) as a signal to move to the next column in the tale, and a return to start a new row.
Return appears to be treated the same way in your example, but I don't see what is triggering the column jumps.
I did notice, though, that your TextEdit file is Rich Text Format ( .rtf ) rather than plain text.
With that in mind, try this:
Make a copy of the Text Edit file, then open the copy in TextEdit and use Format (menu) > Make Plain Text change the copy from rtf (rich text) to plain text (.txt).
TextEdit will warn you this change will replace the opened file with the plain text conversion, (which is the reason you are working with a copy).
Copy the text from the now-converted file, select the top left cell (single click) of the Numbers table, then Paste.
Regards,
Barry
Well spotted!
I'd forgotten about .dbx formatted text files.
Regards,
Barry
How do I copy many lines of text from TextEdit to Numbers?
