I have very large and carefully formatted tables in a Word document. I need to replace the data in the tables by pasting new data from Excel. When I do this, all my tab stops change.

Is there anyway to paste the data without ruining the formatting?

I'd suggest creating a link from Word to the Excel data, so that you don't need to copy & paste the updates. You can create such a link by copying the desired Excel range, and pasting it into Word, using Paste Special>Paste Link and choosing an appropriate paste format (you may have to experiment to find what works best for you). Depending on your requirements, you can do this for the whole Excel range, as a block, or on a cell-by-cell, row-by-row or column-by-column basis.

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