Stop Keynote pasting plain text as spreadsheet cells

Yeah, I did say there were more nuances at play.

Maybe a refinement to the theory is multi-line text?

It's also weird how that text is translated into a table:

it seems to take the first line and break on words (which looks OK), then subsequent lines follow the character counts - e.g. the third cell in the header contains 'is ' (note the trailing space), and the second row contains 'has'... the same number of characters. Likewise for ' dummy ' (7 characters including leading and trailing spaces), 'the ind', and 'er took').

That doesn't explain how Keynote decides where the spaces in the header row go (sometimes it's trailing ('is ', 'text '), sometimes it's leading, sometimes it's both (' Ipsom ', ' dummy '), sometimes none ('simply').

Odd, for sure. :)

I'd never heard of this complaint before, so had to try it.

In my opinion, it's working the right way. Let me explain.

If I copy plain text and paste into Keynote (nothing selected), I get a plain text box with the text as copied - as expected.

If I copy styled text from any application, I get a text box with the formatting preserved.

If I copy tab-delimited data (or something that looks like tab-delimited data), then Keynote assumes I'm pasting a table and creates a corresponding Table object for it.

If I copy any cell from Numbers.app (even just a single cell), then I get a table, although if I double-click a cell, drag over its formula and copy that, I get a text box.

So I think the paste action is dependent on the type of data you're pasting in. Maybe you're copying table-like data more, and that's why you end up with tables on your slides.

I played with this some more, and may have a better insight.

Despite looking the same, your lines above are not identical:

Over the Summer my wife and I 
Over the Summer my wife and I

The first line has a trailing space after the I, whereas the last line does not.

Removing this extraneous space results in the text pasting as a table.

Therefore I surmise that Keynote is looking at the number of 'components' (in this case, space-delimited words) in the pasted text. If it matches across all lines then the text is pasted into a table. If there is any difference in the number of components, then it's pasted as text.

Note that the words don't have to be the same in each line, just the number of words/spaces must match.

It may not be perfect, and there may be more nuances at play that I'm not seeing here, but it clearly indicates that Keynote is trying to be helpful and that the result depends on what you're pasting in.

Sure-fire answer? select (or create) a text box and paste into that. You'll always get text that way.