MAC SOFTWARE
Sage advice to help overcome Mac maladies
QWhen I copy and paste spreadsheet data between Numbers, Microsoft Excel and third-party apps, much of the time it works well, but sometimes goes wrong, most often when handling dates. How can I make it more reliable?
AAlthough macOS and apps have specific data types to represent different types of number, including time and dates, when you copy and paste most numeric data, including from spreadsheets, the contents of the cells are transferred as plain Unicode text. To enable that, the app which you’re copying from converts numbers, times and dates into text separated by tabs – it doesn’t even use Comma-Separated Value (CSV) format – which is placed in the
Clipboard. Then when you paste that data, the receiving app has to recognise the table structure and convert each cell’s contents back into number formats. It’s a minor miracle that it works at all.
One common error is that multiple empty cells collapse into a single cell, shifting those to the right of it and disrupting every column. This can occur because the character used to separate cell values is a tab, rather than the comma used by the CSV format. Correcting that requires tedious manual editing.
There’s no general solution, but when copy and paste runs into difficulty, leaving you with a lot of tidying up before you can use those entries, try exporting as CSV instead, import that, and do your copy and paste in the same app. It will then use its own proprietary data format, which is most likely to work fully.