Pasting to Excel from Word - stop a Word new line being converted into a new cell

Question

So I have a table in MS Word which has two columns. In the second column the text is spread on multiple lines, ie I have pressed 'Enter' to achieve this.

When I paste into Excel, it converts these separate lines into separate cells.

What I want it to do is to keep the lines in the same cell, just on different lines, ie what would happen if I were to press Alt+Enter in a cell in excel.

How would I go about this?

Edit: here's an example of my data. In word it's in a word table.

----------------------------
| Bananas   | - yellow     |
|           | - curved     |
----------------------------
| Apples    | - red/green  |
|           | - round      |
----------------------------

Solution

Better answer: How do I copy Word tables into excel without splitting cells into multiple rows

The trick given is to copy/replace newline character in the Word table with something like the paragraph symbol ¶ (now I know that's also known as a "pilcrow"). You don't have to save the Word document to preserve your original.

Paste the modified data into Excel and then you can do another copy/paste to put the internal line breaks back inside the cells without splitting them. The gimmick on the Excel side is using Alt-codes to define the search and replace. See the referenced link.

Comments

[madmaze]

in word how are the cells separated? also with [enter] ? or is it in a word-table?

[Sean McRaghty]

It's a word table.