When I highlight a cell in a XP office Word 2002 table and copy, what I get is the whole row copied to clipboard as tabbed text. This behaviour is new after years of correct operation.



Similar problem with other table copy/paste of rows and columns or whole table - just pastes tabbed text.

(Also for years I have been using "Paste special" to get plain text. Now it is all I get!)

Mike.

Hi Mike,

Have you tried repairing Word (Help|Detect & Repair)?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Oh, yes, did that, though from Add or remove programs. (I remember the old days when a re-install was almost a reflex action!)

Also, I noted that it is possible to copy an image from one program to another, so clipboard hasn't gone entirely text-only. Even if it had, that would not explain copying a table cell and picking up the whole row.

Mike.

Hi Mike,

Are you sure these errant cells don't actually have tabbed content in them that you can't ordinarily see? It would be quite bizarre for Windows to copy something that wasn't actually selected.

FWIW, reinstalling Word rarely achieves anything that a repair won't.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul, thank you for considering this aberrant, weird, bizarre and infuriating behaviour!

And, yes, I did the "Repair" from the Help as you suggested as well, and it's still the same.

Just to verify, I opened a new document and typed a tabbed alphabet as:(It was all in lower case, so those capitals are something else strange!)

The I used Table->Convert text to Table to construct a six by three table, which looks fine. I highlight an arbitrary complete column, copy it, move to the end of the document and paste. I should get a one by three table with just the column content, but I get the tabbed text exactly as I quote above.

Happy to do any experiment that might get closer to a resolution!

TIA, Mike (retired after 40+ years in IT!).

Hi Mike,

The captialization is standard behaviour.

The paste behaviour suggests the pasting is being done as unformatted text, though I'd only expect tabs from a copied row, now from a column - which should produce separate paragraphs.

Have you checked what addins Word is running - and have you installed any recently?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi again. Yes, I realised later that Word is just trying to be helpful as if I was typing a capitalised sentence and "i" on its own must be "I".

I have never knowingly installed Word add-ins though one often gets offered browser add-ins. Checking using Tools->Templates and Add-ins and the Global add-in list shows as empty.

Agreed it is not quite so surprising that copying a row gets the whole row (though still it should be still in table format). That is why I highlighted a column.

However I have just repeated the experiment on a new document, and that part of the anomaly does not happen. A single column copies into three lines of text each with the content of just the highlighted column(s). At least that means that I can duplicate a column in the table which is one of the things I routinely do. I have no idea how this change (improvement!) in behaviour, which was a major part of my frustration, has come about.

But not being able to copy a table as a table is still a major pain!

Mike.

Hi Mike,

There are numerous flaws that neither repairing nor reinstalling Word will fix. The following link has a number of steps you can take to (hoepfully) remedy the problems you're having: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks Paul, I am getting "Guided Help cannot be downloaded right now" so I shall have to try again later.

Cheers, Mike.

Hi Paul, I'm still getting that stopper. It has no error message to report. Any idea to whom I can complain? Or other ideas?

Your "There are numerous flaws that neither repairing nor reinstalling Word will fix." wasn't very encouraging! But this flaw has appeared from no-where after years of tabulation...

Cheers, Mike.

Hi Mike,

The link works fine for me. Maybe there were some temporary access issues.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul, if you mean the link you gave me, that was fine. I downloaded a 129Kb EXE from there and ran it. A dialogue requests whether the current or a remote PC is to be diagnosed, and then sets out to download the real Guided Help. That is where the failure occurs. The EXE does not say where the download is from, or any error message, so is impossible to follow up. Why it has to be so convoluted beats me, especially when it leads no-where!

Cheers, Mike.

Hi Mike,

I just ran through the process, and the download file was 340KB. That may be related to my different setup, though (Office 2003 & 2010 on Win 7). When run, it's apparent that it needs to be run from an Admin account. If you were doing that and the Fixit applet still bombed, I guess you'll have to go through the manual process outlined on the same web page.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Mike,

It seems a recent Skype Click-to-Call browser add-in is causing problems like your pasting issues on many systems. If you have that, you may need to disable or uninstall this add-in until Skype releases a fix.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks for that suggestion, Paul.

I had run through the complete Word 2002 manual tidy process in filestore and registry without finding any add-ins and without making any difference.

And I had installed Skype at about the same time as the problem arose (though I will go back and check the dates). So I had high hopes of your suggestion.

But unfortunately uninstalling that rather invasive Skype add-in (I won't miss it!) has not cured my problem either.

Since I don't have Excel, I will either have to do table editing via Works Spreadsheet or learn to use OpenOffice word processor instead...

Cheers, Mike.