I can't paste a row into Numbers 3.0 from Excel

It might help if others submit this complaint

What exactly is "this complaint"? That Numbers doesn't support CopyPaste Pro? Or that CopyPaste Pro doesn't produce one of the common formats that Numbers can handle?

SG

I too can confirm that the issue only happens when I try to past 17 columns of data. 1-16 columns is fine!

I do not use CopyPastePro either.

Anyone got a fix?

I'm not even sure we have concensus that there is a problem, much less a fix. I can copy/paste at least 18 columns of data from Excel to Numbers (3.2). I just tried it, 18 columns x 2 rows of data, and it worked fine. I assume I can do more than that; this test was just to see if I could do more than 17 columns.

Ok, just tried again.

Any number or rows, up to and including 16 columns, no issue at all.

Any number of rows, 17 columns - no copy and paste!

I am using Numbers 3.2 and Excel 14.3.9 (2011)

I was a few updates behind on Excel. Now I am at 14.3.9. Still no problem pasting an 18 column x 2 row set of data from Excel to numbers. Something else must be going on on your end, something that is not going on here.

And I have no problem pasting 33 columns and 28 rows from 14.3.9. Beyond 33 columns, though, I can confirm nothing pastes into Numbers. Maybe there's a limit on the number of cells?

SG

Hi All,

Mark wrote: Any number or rows, up to and including 16 columns, no issue at all.

Any number of rows, 17 columns - no copy and paste!

SG wrote: And I have no problem pasting 33 columns and 28 rows

Is this something to do with 17 columns? As far as I can tell from this discussion, 1 to 16 columns seem to work. 17 does not. 18 and more will work. But I could be wrong 🙂.

jruth88 wrote on 3 November 2013:

I do not think it is excel though.

I have notice that It may have something to do with the amount of columns you are trying to copy.

For instance, If i have 1 row 16 columns the paste to numbers 3.0 works. If i push it to 1 row 17 columns then it will not paste (nothing happens).

It does not seem to have a limit to how many rows i select (just Copy/Pasted 137 rows 16 columns no problem) but any row amount with 17 columns of data and it fails.

Perhaps this is a strange property of 17 columns?

Just to throw in some trivia, the number 42 has strange properties. In 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams the number 42 is the answer to the Meaning of Life, but the question is: "What is 7 times 7?" 😉

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)

Regards,

Ian.

Hi Ian,

Maybe we have all stumbled on life, the universe, and everything here in this humble little corner of the Apple Support Communities!

This one truly is an unsolved mystery. Some unseen constraint seems to be at work. But what is it? To find out, how many roads must a man walk down?

SG

After SG reported his limit of 33 columns, I decided to expand my test past 18. Turns out I have a limit of 24 columns. But if I copy the columns then run a "Set Clipboard to Text" script, I can paste more columns into Numbers. I tested this on a 98 column x 3 row set of data.

Thanks for the hint on converting the clipboard to text.

I took a 100 column by 50 row block of cells in Excel, hit command-c to copy them to the clipboard, then ran this script:

set the clipboard to (the clipboardastext)

After running the script the data pastes into Numbers with no problem. I clicked once in a cell and hit command-v.

SG

Using the latest updated versions of Numbers (3.2 (1861)) in Mac OS X.9.2 and latest Excel 2011 (14.3.9 (131030)), I turned off CopyPaste Pro and checked for copy limits.

My limit is 24 columns. I can select in Excel an area 24x2 and it will paste properly into a cell in Numbers, but if I select 25x2 or wider, nothing gets pasted.

If I turn on CopyPaste Pro again, and look at the History pane, which allows me to see the clipboard contents, I can see that when I select 25x2 or wider, only an empty line appears on the clip display. For 24x2 or less, I get the data into the clip ok.

However, when I then paste into a cell in Numbers, the data for both rows is inserted vertically into one column. So it seems that is the contribution of CopyPaste Pro to this problem--it doesn't seem to affect the fundamental limits as to how many columns I can copy from Excel, it just somehow messes up the data so it pastes in the wrong orientation.

The empty line can be examined by pasting it into BBEdit and turning on Show Invisibles, and it seems to be really empty, no tabs or carriage returns or anything.

So I think the workaround workflow is:

1. select the cells in Excel and command-c to copy
2. convert the clipboard to text via a one-line script (as Badunit suggeste)
3. in Numbers click a cell once and command-v to paste.

Not sure how CopyPaste Pro will fit into that, i.e. whether or not it needs to be turned off.

SG

I first turned off CopyPaste Pro. But now things are working a little differently than an hour ago, and I don't know why.

If I select 25x2 in Excel and paste it elsewhere in Excel, it works. But this is special, because the original selection is surrounded by marching ants, so it doesn't mean the clip had really been loaded.

If I go to BBEdit and paste, I see a tab-delimited list of those values, so the clip was loaded (surprised me).

If I then return to Excel (after writing a bit here) and hit cmd-. to get rid of the marching ants, and then paste, it works.

If I go to Numbers and paste, it pastes the entire first row into the target cell, formatted as vertically wrapped text, and the entire second row appears in the cell below that one. So it seems Numbers isn't dealing with the tabs properly.

Go to Script Debugger and convert the clipboard to text. (No Result)

Back to BBEdit and paste, no change--it's still a tab-delimited two lines as before.

But go to Numbers and paste, and it pastes properly now, even though it looks unchanged in BBEdit. So the script apparently changes some invisible metadata, not the visible clip.

Go back to BBEdit and copy a pair of the earlier seen tab-delimited lines, and they now paste OK in Numbers. I suspect that cleans up the metadata just like the script does.

So it seems the metadata associated with the clipboard changes when I go past 24 columns and copy.

Is there a handy tool that shows such things?

Turn on CopyPaste Pro, copy 16 columns by two rows from Excel, paste in Numbers, paste in BBEdit, see all the tabs became returns, so naturally they paste in the wrong direction in Numbers.

Copy 25 by two from Excel, paste in BBEdit, get nothing at all. Run the convert to text script, paste in BBEdit, still get nothing at all.

So it looks like there is something different about the clip when it is wider than 24, which can be cleaned by going through text, but if you have CopyPaste Pro it discards the data from the wider than 24 case without putting anything on the clip, and in the narrower cases it translates tabs in the clip to returns.

So there's a workaround, going through text, if you don't run CopyPaste Pro, but when using CopyPaste Pro you either lose the data from clip or it is improperly translated, so in any case it fails one way or the other.

@ bmc atx:

An aside on the workings of the ASC discussions:

"Despite the attempt by the Apple Support Community to claim this solved my problem, it most decidedly does NOT solve my problem. It's a cumbersome, popsicle-stick and rubber band kind of workaround for a feature that worked fine before."

The green check on your post says nothing at all regarding the solution to your problem, and "the Apple Support Community" as a whole has no say one way or the other on whether a particular post "solved my problem."

Only the initiator of a discussion, in this case, seismojim, can apply the "solved my problem" or "this helped me" markers to posts. Considering the content of the marked post, I'd assume the checkmark was applied in error, and most likely, by accident rather than intent.

Unfortunately, when the OP makes an error of this type, s/he has no way to unmark the post.

Regards,

Barry

...and now, back to our regular topic.

OK, the CopyPaste Pro vs Numbers problem is solved. The company sent me a pre-release fixed version that now handles pasting into Numbers properly.

The copy from Excel still limits at 24 columns, though.