Bugs: Problems pasting from Japanese Excel to Prism

Bug 1: Problems with copying column or row titles

This bug only applies to Prism 5.03 and 5.04 WIndows, and 5.0c and 5.0d Mac.

If you copy a block of data from Excel that includes Japanese row or column titles (Hiragana and Full-width Katakana), the numbers are pasted fine, but the titles are lost when pasted. Presumably this bug would occur with other two-byte language fonts, but we haven't tested this.

Workaround:  Instead of pasting, use Edit..Paste special. On the paste special dialog, set these options:

• Source tab. Enable (check): "Excel: Paste older text-based format"
• Placement tab. Disable (uncheck): "Rename data table, using..."
• Placement] tab. Set "Column titles" to "Use values in row: 1"

Note that you can make those options be the default by checking an option at the bottom of the dialog.

While the bug seems consistent on Windows, it is less consistent on Mac and must depend on exactly which version of Excel and OSX you use. If you use OSC 10.6.6 (or presumably later), the bug does not occur. So updating OSX is a simple way to avoid this problem on a Mac.

This bug is new to 5.03 and 5.04 (and 5.0c and 5.0d), because we improved (for most people) the way data are pasted from Excel. This new choice doesn't work properly with Japanese text, so the trick is to use those options to use the older style of pasting. If you paste link or paste embed (rather than simply pasting values), the bug with Japanese text should not occur.

Bug 2. Problems copying values

This bug only occurs with Prism Mac. If you are using Japanese language with the input type set to hiragana or katakana, numbers copied from Excel Mac (2004, 2008, 2011) simply won't paste into Prism. Set the input type to Romanji, and copy-paste will work fine.

Another workaround, besides switching to Romanji input, is to paste the values into TextEdit, and then copy and paste from there to Prism.