Copying a Table in Numbers

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Level 1

13 points

Copying a Table in Numbers

In Numbers '08 in Snow Leopard, I used to be able copy and paste an entire table by selecting the table, edit->copy and edit->paste, and the table with all of it's formatting and formulas would copy. I recently moved to a new MacBook Air with Lion, and when I tried to do the same thing, when I paste the copied table it loses all of it's formatting and formulas. I thought the problem was Numbers '08 on Lion, so I purchased Numbers '09, and the same thing happens. I really use this feature a lot to copy fairly complex tables and then make minor changes to them. Here's an example of the original table and the copied and pasted table below it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

John

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Jan 30, 2012 1:16 PM

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Answer 1

Barry

Level 9

60,134 points

Jan 30, 2012 8:30 PM in response to johncp

You haven't indicated where you're pasting the tables, so this may not help.

Have you tried Duplicating the table?

Click on the table's icon, then press command-D.

You'll get a second copy of the same table on the same sheet.

It can be moved to another location on the same sheet by dragging or by using the arrows keys (with shift included for faster movement).

It can be moved to another sheet by dragging its icon in the sheets list.

Regards,

Barry

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Answer 2

johncp Author

Level 1

13 points

Jan 31, 2012 4:17 AM in response to Barry

Thanks for the response. After racking my brain about this issue for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon, I woke up in the middle of the night with the answer. Around a month ago I had installed a utility called Clipboard Cleaner which clears all formatting from anything copied to the clipboard. It really works great for copying and pasting snippets of text from one place to another without having to reformat it. I guess I didn't realize that it would also clear the formatting for an entire table. DUH!!!!! Once I turned Clipboard Cleaner off, everything works fine. Oh well, at least this experience pushed me to upgrading to Numbers '09 . . . . .

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Answer 3

Yellowbox

Level 7

22,023 points

Aug 23, 2016 10:44 AM in response to SOMV23

Hi SOMV23,

Thanks so much for this! You have just also solved my problem.

This is a really old thread, starting with Numbers '08 in January 2012 with OS X Snow Leopard (both now "Orphanware"). Then the discussion moved to Numbers '09.

The current version of Numbers is version 3.6.2 and the current version of OS X is El Capitan 10.11.5.

It will help other users in 2016 if you could reply with how this solved your problem. Please reply with details of your version of Numbers, and the version of your operating system, and how this solved your problem. What was the problem?

Regards,

Ian.

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Answer 4

SOMV23

Level 1

4 points

Aug 23, 2016 9:54 AM in response to johncp

Thanks so much for this! You have just also solved my problem.

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