How do you cut and paste tables in and out of Excel from either Mail.app or Outlook 2011?

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Level 1

0 points

How do you cut and paste tables in and out of Excel from either Mail.app or Outlook 2011?

When I try to cut and paste a table generated in Excel for Mac into the body of an email the formatting holds but when I send the table is reduced to one column. Same is true for copying from incoming mail into Excel, when I paste into Excel it is reduced to one column rather than keeping the table format. I have tried using mail.app and went out and Outlook 2011 and both programs have the same issue. The reformatting also happens when I forward an email received from a coworker that contains a table, not just on cut and paste operations.

I need to do this regularly and right now my only option is using my old PC where the cut and paste function keeps formatting between Excel and Outlook just fine. Attaching a pdf or excel file is not an option. There has to be a way to maintain the formatting and being able to extract the tables keeping them intact. Please let me know if you have a solution to maintain this formatting within email programs. Thank you in advance.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), iOS 7.0.4

Posted on Jan 17, 2014 1:21 PM

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Answer 1

jmavra

Level 1

8 points

Mar 7, 2014 1:56 PM in response to Krausen

Krausen, did you ever figure something out for this. A good friend finally made the switch to MAC but is having problems copying a table from an email and pasting it into Excel. It all goes into one column. The funny thing is that if you copy the same table into Word, then copy from Word into Excel it works fine.

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Answer 2

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Jan 17, 2014 3:54 PM in response to Krausen

I just checked using Excel 2011, Mac Mail, Mavericks

I copied a table from Excel, pasted it into a new email, sent it to another email address and opened the email.

The table did not change at all, formatting, columns and alignment were all preserved.

I will repeat the test using Outlook 2011.

Same result, the table copied amd pasted correctly, the emailed copy appears the same as the original.

But I am not sure why yours doesn't

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Answer 3

Krausen Author

Level 1

0 points

Jan 17, 2014 4:36 PM in response to Krausen

Selecting all does not help - the issue is I need a table within an incoming email to be moved to excel, edited and then pasted back into a new email. "Select All" picks up the email headers, signatures, any messages around the table etc so that doesn't work. Also, as pointed out above Excel doesn't have a select all feature to get the tables back into the body of an email.

I just tried again going from Excel into Outlook 2011. No luck. All one column down the left side of the email. All columns are removed and text crammed into one column. Just to check I cut from one Excel document and pasted into another and it retained all formating just fine. It is only in and out of Outlook that seems to be the issue.

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Answer 4

Krausen Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 7, 2014 2:03 PM in response to jmavra

Nope. I have been reduced to sending command+shift+4 screenshots to eveyone who needs to read these tables. Very poor solution but workable for now until I can figure out a solution. It is totally a MAC>PC thing as when I tried to test it out with a co-worker who has a MacBook Pro it worked great. As soon as I sent it to someone with a PC the formatting was lost.

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Answer 5

burak55

Level 1

0 points

Mar 12, 2015 7:06 AM in response to Krausen

Hello, I have a workaround. Copy the sheet from MAIL tool and then paste it into "Numbers"(Apple Tool, it is the corresponding Software which comes with Mac free). You will see that unlike the Excel it will be pasted as a table succesfully. And then re-copy the same table from "Numbers" and paste it into Excel.

It works for me.

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