Pages.app removes formatting in Numbers.app sheet on mail merge

On mail merge a Numbers document, Pages strips the formatting in Numbers. For style that's OK, but Pages also strips tabs and enters ('\r'). Here is my flow: In a FileMaker document I have a field containing text with newlines and tabs, nicely formatted, e.g.MacMini \r MacPro. I export the FMPro database to a csv file (comma separated). This file goes into Pages.app. In Pages, in the first row and the first cell I see the two models each on their own line with a linefeed symbol (the double legged q) separating them. I insert a row above and tell Numbers to use the new row as a header row. Insert 'models' into the first cell.
Now I do a mail merge on 'models' in my document. The merged file now contains 'MacMini MacPro' and the '\r' has been stripped. Same for '\t' tabs.

Any hints on how to retain this formatting on a mail merge, lest coding every '\r' and \t to a weird group of characters in the csv file and uncoding them in the resulting Pages merged document?