Tab Delimited Text Copy Paste To Excel

Question

I am generating a block of text via C# Stringbuilder, with appropriately tab-delimited text (new lines, "\t", etc.) and displaying the text within a tag in my web application. If I copy/paste this to Excel, all the text pastes into the first column on the spreadsheet.

If I copy the outerHTML of the block (Chrome) or copy/paste into Notepad++ and THEN paste to Excel, all the data pastes neatly into individual cells - which is the desired outcome of this effort. Can anyone tell me what I need to do in order to be able to copy the text from my application and paste it into Excel, so that the text pastes into individual cells (ie, keeps the tab-delimited format)?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it appears an extra step is required.

The default behaviour of paste in Excel (& many other applications) is to use the original format of the contents of the clipboard.

Copying from a web application/HTML page will result in the clipboard contents being flagged as HTML. The clipboard contents will have the tab character, but as HTML renders tabs to whitespace (compacting to a single whitespace if there are multiple tabs) - just using control-V will convert the tabs to spaces & the contents will appear in a single cell when pasting into Excel..

You will need to use the "Paste Special" option & select "Unicode text" to retain the tabs. There is no way to set this by default : https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel-mso_windows8-mso_365hp/how-to-change-default-paste-behavior-with-ctrl-v/f58da075-8fd5-4c80-a64b-5e71ec8ad38b?auth=1

Copying the outerHTML of Chrome sets the clipboard format to text in the first place, pasting to Notepad++ does paste as text rather than HTML then recopying sets the format to text - which is why these methods work.