How to highlight only one column
I am trying to highlight and copy one column but the one next to it is also highlighted. Help!!
Could you walk us through what you're trying to do in a bit more detail, please?
5 replies
There is an article I want to paste onto text edit. The article has several pages and each page contains two columns. When I highlight column left, column right is also highlighted. When I paste this onto text edit the paragraphs and columns are all mixed up. Apparently only one column can be pasted at a time. I have to be able to highlight one column at a time to accomplish the task. How do you highlight only one column at a time without the one next to it also being highlighted?
It may not be doable otherwise than you describe, unless there is a printable version you can click on.
If the page comes up in Reader you may be able to copy/paste from that.
I fear Klaus may be right about the doability of this in Safari.
How about the following workaround? Don't have a Mac available at the moment, so it's a bit experimental.
Do a "Paste with current style" in TextEdit of the entire table. (Fingers crossed, that should preserve the tab formatting of the entire table). Now copy the entire-table-stuff from TextEdit into a spreadsheet application like Numbers or Excel. Fingers crossed it'll show up in the spreadsheet as a table. Delete the extra columns from the table in the spreadsheet. Copy the single column back into TextEdit, delete the entire table-stuff. Klunky (assuming it works), but probably quicker than entering cells one at a time from Safari into TextEdit
Suggesting doing it this way, because if you try copying an entire table directly from Safari into the speadsheet, it's got a nasty habit of stashing all the columns into a single column, which is not immediately helpful. If you're using Numbers on the Mac, it might be worth checking in over at the Numbers community to see if they've got workarounds for converting a "single-column-mess" produced by pasting from Safari into Numbers into a proper table. (I think Yvan might have a script for that, but I'm not sure.)
I figured it out. Export the whole text into a PDF. Open with Preview. Within Preview, you can highlight only one column at a time and copy.
How to highlight only one column