How can I paste into a merged cell?

[Guest]

Word document provide input data which consists of a varyable number of lines
ending with paragraph mark and manual line break. Attepmting to copying the
input data into a merged cell results in "Data on the clipboard is not the
same size and shape as the selected area. Do you want to paste the data
anyway?" On clicking "OK", the paste fails with an error message "cannot
change part of a merged cell".

Can the line endings (including paragraph character) be converted into
Alt-Enter which Excel supports for manually entered multi-line data in single
and merged cells?

 

[Dave Peterson]

If you're doing one cell at a time, maybe you could just paste into the formula
bar???

 

[Guest]

Dave

Thank you for your suggestion. Curiously, it doesn't paste into the cell but
does works via the formula bar. However problems remain:
1. the contents are not all visible even at 8 point font because the row
height is limited to 409 points (I designed the worksheet for clean
ergonomics and to print well over 1+ pages)
2. embedded objects are lost in the process
3. excel does not disable insert | objects create from file but it fails
whether you select link, icon or neither if the worksheet is protected; it
succeeds if the worksheet is unprotected.

Re point 3, looks like I create a macro.

Your further thoughts are welcome.
Gary

 

[Dave Peterson]

#1. I'm not sure how many characters you're copy|pasting, but maybe a smaller
font would be in order--or a wider column?

#2. Copy|Paste multiple times???? Once for the text and once for each
object???

#3. Unprotect, paste, reprotect???

======
But if all your stuff works ok when cells are not merged, maybe it's better to
drop the merged cells completely--or remove the merged cells, do the work and
remerge the cells.

(I do my best to avoid using merged cells. They cause a lot of problems.)