Excel — How to paste copied text into one cell
Do you ever find yourself copying and pasting data into Excel and it spreads over several rows? That is because Excel breaks up the data so the first paragraph or line goes into A1, the second goes into A2, etc. Example below is a copy of an address from a PDF and paste into Excel.
But what if you need all the text to be in just one cell? Do you need to cut, paste and alt + enter to get this formatted correctly? No — you just need to paste the data into Excel while in Edit Mode.
Normally when you select a cell in Excel in looks like below — outlining the cell.
To switch into Edit mode, either Double-click the cell or select the cell and press F2. Edit mode will put a live cursor into the cell.
A subtle change, but a time saving trick. Now you can paste your paragraph or list in its entirety just in the cell you’ve selected.
Of course you may need to adjust the appearance after you paste, depending on the format of your original text and the size of the cell you pasted into. In this example the column is simply too narrow. There are several ways to adjust the column width, but the easiest way is to Double-click on the line between A and B — the column will automatically adjust to fit the contents. And now your address is in one cell and very readable.
