You can't retain the Word formatting that way, though you could enable text wrapping within Excel. Moreover, a document that's got complex formatting (e.g. numbered, bulleted, indented, justified paragraphs) would be totally screwed up for copy/paste purposes by what you're suggesting. Perhaps you should consider pasting the document into Excel as an embedded object.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]