When copying a cell with line breaks in Excel and pasting it into Notepad, the text is pasted onto one line. Why is that?
Excel – Why do Excel line breaks not transfer into Notepad
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Related Solutions
How your text gets copied in to Word depends on the formatting option chosen. In Word 2010, the default format option is HTML Format. There are four main options for how to copy text into Word. (Formatted Text (RTF), Unformatted Text, HTML Format, & Unformatted Unicode Text)
Pasting in with formatted text creates mini tables in Word. (The blue outlines.)
To get unformatted text in Word without the double quotes:
- Paste the text in formatted so it creates the table.
- Select the table and copy it.
- Move to a blank spot and paste the new copy as unformatted text. (
Alt + E,S)
This also works to paste the results without quotes into another editor. Simply alter step 3 to paste into the other editor.
It would probably be faster however, to simply paste as normal and then use Replace to find and remove all double quotes.
I've had the same issues with Notepad. Loading the file and analyzing it's contents in binary showed the reason: the line which starts with small font letters contains the "EF BB BF" Byte order mark (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark).
What to do: somehow this mark is preserved even on saving the file. Some editing will cause Notepad to recognize the Unicode and tell you that it will be lost if you save the text. You can also go to the very start and delete the invisible "character" by pressing the "Delete" key. (The font will get big again in an instant.)
How this happened (in my case): I was creating text files with Unicode markers and later on the text-lines were sorted and saved again. The byte order mark became part of a line of text that was put at the end of the file (invisible mark screwed up the sort order) and in the middle of the text this mark just causes this effect.
Best Answer
Its due to the nature of how spreadsheets work. Imagine you have a spreadsheet full of data. If you were to copy an entire row of data, then paste it into Notepad, all of that data needs to be on one line. This is because if you were to copy another row of data and paste it, the next row of data needs to be on one line. If there were line breaks in the first row you copied, the data would no longer be in two linear rows. If you were to copy the data out of Notepad and back into the spreadsheet, it would not paste properly.