Choices when pasting data from Excel

 Prism 5.03 and 5.0c introduced new choices for how data are pasted from Excel to Prism.

What Excel puts on the clipboard

Excel Windows 2003 and later, and Excel Mac 2008, copy data to the clipboard in two formats: Plain text, and HTML.

Until now, Prism has pasted from the simpler text format.  By default,  Prism (starting with 5.0c and 5.03) pastes the HTML format. This will allow much better pasting of Greek letters, superscripts and subscripts, titles with punctuation, numbers with nonstandard thousands or decimal separators, and more.

There is one change. If the Excel cell contains a mixture of numbers and letters (or punctuation), prior versions tried to extract and paste just the numbers. Prism Mac still works that way, but Prism Windows won't paste anything into numerical parts of a Prism table if the corresponding Excel cell mixes numbers and text. 

This new style of pasting only applies when pasting values. Paste-embedding and paste-linking (Windows only) are not changed.

Numbers, a Mac spreadsheet that is part of iWork, does not copy the HTML information that Excel does. So pasting from Numbers is no different in 5.0c than it was in 5.0b.

Changing back to the old style

Pasting from the HTML rendition is the default. If it causes any problems, use Edit..Paste Special and check the new option on the first tab:

    [ x]Paste older text-based clipboard format. Not recommended.

With this option selected, pasting will work just as it did with earlier releases of Prism. We know of only one situation where this is helpful. If your columns in Excel are very narrow so only show one or a few digits, that is all that will paste with the default style. Check the option to paste the older style, and the values will paste in full, even the parts you can't see in Excel. 

Excel 2003: Two ways to paste from the HTML

It gets even more complicated if you use Excel 2003. The HTML clipboard version contains each number twice. One copy shows exactly what you see in Excel. The other copy shows the value with more decimal places (ignoring formatting or rounding within Excel). By default, Prism 5.03 and 5.0c and later paste the values as they are shown in Excel. But the Paste Special dialog lets you use the other version if you prefer:

 [x ]Paste as many digits as possible. If Excel rounds to 1.23, paste 1.23456

This option is not available if you copy from Excel 2007 or later, as the necessary information is not copied to the clipboard.

Note a bug in Excel 2008. In very rare cases, using that option will result in the wrong values being pasted into Prism.