Tables: Pasting content to table

[IOIO]

First of all, affinity, I love you! Thanks for awesome and affordable software! 💖

About the bugs:
1. When I copy content from an HTML table and paste it into a table in Publisher, the content in the clipboard is not interpreted as a table and is therefore only inserted into the first cell.
This is a feature I have to use often and it worked well in InDesign and works also in software like Numbers or Excel.

2. When I insert table content from Apple Numbers, the content is inserted not from the first but the second table line. So there is always an empty line at the top and at the bottom another line is added.
Pasting from Excel works correctly.

Thanks!

[Seneca]

1 hour ago, IOIO said:

When I copy content from an HTML table and paste it into a table in Publisher, the content in the clipboard is not interpreted as a table and is therefore only inserted into the first cell.

I think you should post this in the Features Requests & Suggestions section.

[Gabe]

Hi @IOIO,

I can copy-paste html tables and they work fine. Try it with this table: https://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_table_intro

I've logged the Apple Numbers issue

[garrettm30]

5 hours ago, Gabe said:

I can copy-paste html tables and they work fine.

This will depend in large part on how each browser copies the table. @IOIO If the table from Gabe's link above does not work for you, I suggest you try it in a different browser.

Also, it may depend further on how the table is written in HTML, for example, whether <thead> and <tbody> are explicitly defined or the <table> just includes a bunch of <tr> as its immediate children.

Copy and paste from one program to another involves quite a lot of variability for how each handles the variety of content possibilities, so I am sympathetic to Serif if it does not work perfectly in every combination, and I do appreciate their making a reasonable effort to support as much as possible.

[thomaso]

10 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

16 hours ago, Gabe said:

I can copy-paste html tables and they work fine. Try it with this table: https://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_table_intro

This will depend in large part on how each browser copies the table. (...) If the table from Gabe's link above does not work for you, I suggest you try it in a different browser.

Thanks for the valuable supplement.
Otherwise I might have started to paste the copied text somewhere else and fiddle around with f&r for the tab keys, which occurred by copying from my daily browser:

p.s.: @Alfred "Alfreds Futterkiste"

[Seneca]

14 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

This will depend in large part on how each browser copies the table.

I've just tried this. Copied the table linked by Gabe using Safari.

I then selected the right number of columns and rows and pasted the table successfully.

However, this doesn't work if I leave the cursor in a cell and paste. All get's pasted into one cell.

I think Publisher should realise that the contents of a table are pasted into an existing table and it should paste that to appropriate cells.

So, there is room for improvement here as far as I am concerned. 🙂

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, Seneca said:

I then selected the right number of columns and rows and pasted the table successfully. (...) I think Publisher should realise that the contents of a table are pasted into an existing table and it should paste that to appropriate cells.

In my two trials above I had created a new table of 'any' size first, then placed the cursor in the 1st cell (without selecting any cell) and pasted – with different results for quite the same situation: worked for 1 of 2 trails.

Now I tried again but with selecting the appropriate number of cells before pasting – with the content copied from the Cliqz browser again it gets pasted in the first cell only.
Also pre-selecting a number of cells which is higher than needed doesn't work with this copied content.

In case it really would need me to select the appropriate number of cells before pasting then it feels like not working, because with large tables one hardly can count ('manually') the number of cells/rows first.

[Gabe]

I believe have an answer for this inconsistent behaviour.

• When you just click inside the cell, the text will get pasted inside the text frame, without formatting it as table
• When you select the table cell  and then paste, it should bring the formatted table across.

 

[thomaso]

Gabe, maybe this makes a difference. But there also is a different result within 1 same workflow:

In the two screenshots above for both tables I had "placed the cursor in the 1st cell (without selecting any cell) and pasted" – it appeared that only content copied from Safari gets placed as expected, from Cliqz (~Firefox) it did not.

Also I tried for content from Cliqz to select both a.)  either all and b.) exactly the needed number of cells before pasting. Both did not work either.

[Gabe]

Thanks. I logged it with our developers

[nezero]

Ran into the exact same issue. No matter in which way I select the table or which browser the copied table contents come from, Publisher is pasting all of it inside of one cell. Any progress on this?

[Gabe]

I'm afraid no. Sorry.