A forward by a friend - may be of use to Wikipedians!
Ashwin Baindur
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brigadier F T Rangwala < >
Date: Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 8:12 AM
Subject: Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word
To: ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com
Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word
Standard web tables can be copied from a web page to Word or Excel, but not
many tables on Wikipedia pages.
Office-Watch.com shows you how to do it.
Even if you’re not copying from Wikipedia, we’ll show you some useful Word
skills.
Tables on Wikipedia and some other web sites have additional code that
confuses Microsoft Office. If you try to paste the web table into Excel,
all you get is unreadable confusion instead of a Word table.
Whenever this happens, you need to find out what it really being pasted. To
do that, switch to Word and paste the web content into a blank document
with all characters on view.
Create a blank document in Word
Copy the web table from a page and use Paste Special to paste it into Word
using the ‘Keep Text Only’ or ‘Unformatted Text’ option.
[image: Word paste keep text only image from Copying tables from Wikipedia
to Word at
Office-Watch.com]
[image: Word Wikipedia pasted table image from Copying tables from
Wikipedia to Word at
Office-Watch.com]
If the pasted content looks like this:
[image: Word Wikipedia pasted table default image from Copying tables from
Wikipedia to Word at
Office-Watch.com]
You’ve chosen the default Word paste, not the plain text paste.
Now turn on the Show All option (if it isn’t already). This will show you
the hidden characters separating the data / cell elements. Word 2010 and
Word 2007 – on the Home tab, Paragraph section look for the ¶ (pilcrow)
icon.
Now you can see what formatting marks are lurking in between the data. In
the case of a Wikipedia table you might see something like this …
[image: Word pasted table show all image from Copying tables from Wikipedia
to Word at
Office-Watch.com]
Those arrow marks are tab characters. Now we know that tabs separate the
data on each line we can use another Word feature, converting text into a
table.
Select all the pasted ‘table’ data then choose Insert | Table | Convert
Text to Table
[image: Word convert text to table image from Copying tables from Wikipedia
to Word at
Office-Watch.com]
A dialog will appear to let you choose some options for the new table.
[image: Word convert text to table dialog image from Copying tables from
Wikipedia to Word at
Office-Watch.com]
Make sure ‘Tabs’ is chosen as the separator. Word will try to guess the
number of columns of data to create. In our tests this guess wasn’t always
accurate so it is worth double-checking before clicking OK.
Word will convert the selected text into a table like magic.
Now you have a table you can select it all and copy into Excel.
Tidy up
Before you use the table, look through it for any glitches. For example
this extra row in the table can be deleted with the text moved to the last
column of the previous row.
[image: Word pasted table result image from Copying tables from Wikipedia
to Word at
Office-Watch.com]
There are some footnote numbers ‘Francen3’ that you’ll need to remove or
convert into Word footnotes.
In this example, the name of each country has a space before it. That might
not be a problem, but if you need to remove the extra spaces you’ll need to
return to the tab delimited text version so you can use the Replace command
to replace the characters ‘Tab and Space’ (Code: ^t^w ) with just ‘Tab’ (
^t )then do a ‘Text to Table’ conversion.
[image: Word replace tab and space with space only image from Copying
tables from Wikipedia to Word at
Office-Watch.com]
Once you have the table looking OK you can copy it into either another Word
document or Excel.
*See an expanded version of this article at
**Office-Watch.com*<http://office-watch.com/?1739>
-----------------------------------------------------
Brigadier F T Rangwala,
F1/1, Salunke Vihar,
Army Welfare Coop Hsg Soc,
PO SRPF,
Pune 411 022
______________________________
Tele: +91(20) 2685 0697
Cell: 098220 34552
--
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------