Thread: How to combine text in multiple cells? (problems with importing from html table)

After you copy the HTML file and go back to Excel, try right-clicking and selecting Paste Special. You can try pasting as Text or Unicode Text....that sometimes works, with little tweaking afterwards.

Originally Posted by kayak_pirate81

Hi, I am doing some qualitative analysis of some text using excel. My data right now is in an html table, and when I try to copy the table it sometimes puts the text that was intially in one cell into multiple cells in Excel if there were breaks in the text within the cell of the table. So, if a cell contains 5 lines of text with line breaks between them <br>, when I bring it into excel it puts the content into 5 different cells (in the same column). Does anyone know if there is a way: 1. to prevent this from happening when I paste, or 2. to combine all 5 of the cells into one cell with multiple lines? Thanks for any help!

This method workes well to combine/separate formatted information from different/one cell. I hope you have Word

Mark the columes which lines you want to combine. Copy and paste into Word. Highlight table. Select Table --> convert --> table to text. Select divider (e.g. space if you want to use it as real text). Highlight text, copy and paste back into excel.

The same method works the other way around, e.g. to divide address information, separated by a unique separator (comma, space) into different columns.

To break text in a cell, select cell, right click, select cell format, select 2nd tab from left ("alignment" or something) and put a check where it says "line break". Now if you change the cell dimensions, the text will try to snuggle in. However in Excel there is no line break within a cell like when you hit "Enter" in Word.

Hope this helps