pasting clipboard from Excel

[Jim Ault]

On Sep 13, 2011, at 8:23 AM, Colin Holgate wrote:

> How would you do that? 'the clipboard' just reports having 'text'.
>
> Jonathan, the actual application is for a client to be able to  
> convert a selected range of cells into a specific format XML. By far  
> the easiest way to have them do that is to select the cells, Copy,  
> go to the revlet window, and click a big friendly button. The text  
> on the clipboard is then in the right XML format, ready to be pasted  
> into an XML configuration file.
>
> For the moment I just instruct them to do a "test Paste" of the  
> copied cells into their text editor, before going into the revlet.  
> That's enough to fix the problem.


You could have them click at the top of the first column (select the  
whole column) which would have a formula on each row that would create  
clean text from the cells to the right.

You might also be a victim of cell and intra-cell text formatting that  
is possible in modern Excel versions.
One extra format that creates havoc is the hyperlink.

The last check of there spreadsheet would be to see if they use the  
rarely employed 'cell comments' which adds some special character in  
the cell.

  It is tricky when the user gets to choose the cells to be copied.  I  
have spent many hours with this, especially in the old days of  
Filemaker fields and converting Word documents to clean text.

PS  You might discover that your 'gathering formulas' stop working if  
the user inserts or deletes cells, but the formulas will keep working  
if you use the INDIRECT() function.



Jim Ault
Las Vegas