Copying and Pasting Stubborn Tables into Excel

Today's tip is about copying and pasting from a program, such as a web browser, into Excel and retaining the table format.

Let's start with a site such as University of Michigan's Win-Loss Record against football opponents.

If you copy the text I show to the left and try to paste it into Excel you get something that looks like this.

There are two ways to fix this stubborn paste. The first is to paste as text in the paste special menu in Excel. If that isn't available to you (or it won't work which I've found in some cases) then you can try option 2. Copy the table from the website (or other source, such as a PDF) and paste it into notepad.

Then copy and paste as normal into Excel. What you'll see will be a reasonably close resemblance of the table you just copied. As you'll see below you may have to move around a few of the column headers, but that's a lot easier than where you started.

Here's to easier copying and pasting tables into Excel for manipulation.