Why does copying multi-row text from Google Sheets to the Instagram caption box add a quote mark at the beginning and end of the text?

Question

This may be the most niche question ever but let's try it anyway.

I have a Google Sheets spreadsheet that contains cells with multiple lines of text. Each line of text is separated by a soft break.

As shown below, when I copy the contents of a cell (row 2 in the screenshot) from the Google Sheets app to the Instagram caption box, a quote mark is added to the beginning and end of the caption.

If I copy the contents of a cell and that cell has only a single line of text (row 3 in the screenshot), no quote mark is added.

I am using an iPhone 11 running the latest version of iOS.

Answer 1

The extra quotes are added when there are special characters in the cell. In your scenario, the Line Feed characters are causing this. Definitely annoying.

There is a way around this – using Carriage Return characters, rather than Line Feeds to separate each line. For some reason these characters don’t cause the quotation marks to appear.

One thing you can do in your sheet is to create a helper cell that will take your text, and replace the line feeds with carriage returns (assuming your input text is in cell A2, add this formula to an empty cell):

=SUBSTITUTE(A2,char(10),char(13))

The output for this will look like it doesn’t contain linefeeds, but when you copy & paste from that cell, the linefeeds will be there in the pasted text, without the extra quotation marks.