EXCEL 2000 and WORD 2000 Pasted table

  • Thread starter Thread starter Denis Brennan
  • Start date Start date
D

Denis Brennan

I have a table in Word. I want to paste this table into EXCEL because I
need to do some more sophisticated sorting. The table contains text
fields like the following
xcxxcxcxcxcxc (1) (a) (iii)

I copy my table. I open EXCEL and format the columns as TEXT. I then
paste my table into EXCEL. In the example above the value (1) becomes
-1 in EXCEL. EXCEL is obviously treating this as a negative number, but
I want to retain the formant (1), because, in fact, it is a sub-section
reference and eventually, I want to be able to sort by this column
(amnogst others). I will then copy the table back into WORD and convert
table to text for printing.

How can I avoid EXCEL changing teh formatting?

Many thanks for any help you can offer.

Denis.
 
I think you could change your windows regional settings for negative numbers to
show (1) instead of -1, but I think I'd just format that column(?) using a
custom format:

Select the range
format|cells
Number tab
custom category
type box: General;(0)

It seemed to work ok when I copied and pasted back to Word, too.

(And when you sort, sort in descending sequence so that -1 comes before -8.

The underlying value is still a negative number, but it doesn't seem to bother
anything.
 
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