I have a Word table which contains 3 columns and several hundred rows which I want to paste into an Excel spreadsheet.

The problem is that middle column of the table contains several lines of text, including line breaks, per row of the table.

When I paste the table into Excel, each line of text ends up in a separate Excel row even though they were all contained within a single table cell in the Word document.

There seems to be no easy way to fix this problem in Excel and I am wondering if I have to edit the Word document to remove all of the line breaks, do the copy and paste into Excel and then go and put all of the line breaks back in by hand to preserve the formatting that I want.

Help!!

I am an experienced programmer (25 years) but an Excel novice and I can't believe that something this simple and obvious could be so difficult so I assume that I must be missing something ...

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Michael