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OK, I've got a table set up & filled. But now I need to make it as 'flat' text. 10 years ago there seems to have been a command for that, in Format>Table>convert....
But is there such a command for Pages 11.2, and where might it be?
This is not a passing question, when you have tables pasted in from a web page & you need to get the contents into something useable.
Mac Pro, macOS 12.1
Apple has not provided any menu-driven automated table<=>text conversion feature since Fall 2013. LibreOffice Writer has this feature though.
Your options:
I tend to prefer [1] as I don't need to leave Pages. Not all browsers place the same content on the clipboard when you copy/paste a table from them, and that is especially true if that Web table is not pure HTML with CSS3 styling, but rather a pure CSS3 table without the HTML tag structure. Safari will paste Apple-friendly RTF content because it has HTML to RTF conversion frameworks available to it, but Pages has no HTML or CSS3 awareness as do MS Word or even TextEdit.
Apple has not provided any menu-driven automated table<=>text conversion feature since Fall 2013. LibreOffice Writer has this feature though.
Your options:
I tend to prefer [1] as I don't need to leave Pages. Not all browsers place the same content on the clipboard when you copy/paste a table from them, and that is especially true if that Web table is not pure HTML with CSS3 styling, but rather a pure CSS3 table without the HTML tag structure. Safari will paste Apple-friendly RTF content because it has HTML to RTF conversion frameworks available to it, but Pages has no HTML or CSS3 awareness as do MS Word or even TextEdit.
"10 years ago" would be the time of transition from Pages '09 to Pages v5.x. Here are the Table menus from Pages '09 (v4.x) and Pages 5.x:
Pages '09:
Pages '09 included this item. Greyed here as no Table was selected when the screen shot was taken.
Pages v5.6.2
The menu item was not included in this version of {Pages, or any version since then.
"OK, I've got a table set up & filled. But now I need to make it as 'flat' text."
Assuming that the "flat text" qualification can be satisfied with 'the contents of each cell of a table, expressed as text values, with the contents of cells in a row separated by commas* and rows separated by a new line control charater", ther conversion can be done by exporting the file to a txt file.
In the case of a file containing more than the table, it might be necessary to copy the table and paste it to a new (and empty) Pages document before doing the export.
Another tactic would be to select all cells containing the text you want to convert, then using Paste and Match Style to paste that text into a table-free space in the receiving document.
You have the history down cold, but I no longer have a copy of Pages '09 available. :(
Exporting the doc with only a table in it to Plain text did not result in text. It says it only exports body text, & I confirmed taht.
A Paste & Match command did not do what I needed either -- it kept the table when I tried it.
I did find a solution in VikingOSX's solution above.
When I copied a table, with rows, etc., & pasted into a text box, it dumped all the text material into the text box. I then grabbed the contents of the text box & pasted that into the body of the doc, & got what I wanted. End of row (in tele) is now a carriage return, which is useful.
Not the simplest way to get rid of a table, but it seems to work. Graphics survive the experience. I'll have to see what happens if I give the text box multiple pages at one time.
Text Box does not paginate, just expands the content pasted into it below the overflow ⊞ symbol, and you would have to perform a select all in the Text box, with copy and paste into the body text, to avoid expanding or linking it to another text box to show all of the content flow.
[ oops … wrong recipient]
Sounds reasonable :). Thanks,
Convert a table to text - how to do with Pages 11.2?
