General Question

zina's avatar

How do you paste information from Numbers (like Excel) into Pages (like Word) WITHOUT the grid --- so that just the text shows up, separated by tabs)?

Asked by zina (1661points) April 28th, 2008

I searched the help menus to no avail and am SUPER frustrated.

Observing members: 0 Composing members: 0

8 Answers

jrpowell's avatar

This is a really clunky solution. In numbers select File -> Export -> Save as PDF.

Then you can open that PDF and copy and paste into Pages and it will lose the formating. I wish I knew of a better way. I have been trying for about 20 minutes and that is the best I could come up with.

PupnTaco's avatar

Save the Excel sheet as tab-delimited text, then open that in Pages.

jrpowell's avatar

@PupnTaco
Numbers is like Excel but isn’t Excel. Numbers doesn’t give you that option. Well, I can’t find if it does exist.

sndfreQ's avatar

There seems to be two ways to go about doing this:

1. Copy and Paste the table from Numbers into Pages, then in Pages, Choose File/Export, and save as an RTF or TXT file. The RTF seems to retain most of the formatting and most closely resembles tab-delimited text;

and

2. From Numbers Choose File/Export and save as CSV; all three options for saving yield the same comma separated value format. Next, locate the file in Finder, and click on the file name and change its tag from .csv to .txt; Click “change to .txt” to confirm, then open the ’.txt’ file in Pages (File/Open, or in Finder, control-click on the file and choose “Open With/Pages” from the pull-down). This method “tricks” Pages into thinking the file is a .txt, even though it’s a CSV.

Another intermediate step you can do with either method (to change commas into tabs) is to open the CSV with a text editor, and replace the commas with tabs prior to opening in Pages.

IMO, option 1 seems to be the easier of the two options.

PupnTaco's avatar

Beat me to it, CSV is the way. Find & replace the commas with tabs.

wildflower's avatar

Just copy from Numbers and in Pages go: Edit -> Paste and Match Style

Arglebargle_IV's avatar

Check out Paste Special! It will give you options of pasting as HTML, RTF and maybe some other formats that I don’t recall.
I use Paste Special all the time when I want to control the look of “complex” data when I paste into Word.
The CSV approach will also certainly work, but this is really fast and takes one step!

jvgr's avatar

“I searched the help menus to no avail and am SUPER frustrated.”
Since my 2 options have been stated I want to know:

Who hires the people at MSFT that decide what terms are associated with which help items. Super Frustrated is right. Those indexers need to be trained.

The only reason I prefer a hard copy manual is that I have the option to flip the pages and, perhaps, stumble on the answer I am seeking.

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