Have you ever copied something from a web page and tried to put it into an Excel spreadsheet? If you’re like me, you would rather not type the information into a cell. You’d rather copy and paste it. At least that way you don’t have typos.
But what happens to the copied material when it is placed into the Excel spreadsheet? You wait and wait for Excel to figure out what the format needs to be to keep it like the web page. Then, it comes out bold, in large or small type, and maybe even different colors, depending upon what it looked like on the web page. You may also get an active link you don’t want.
Now what do you do? Well after the long wait to see what the data looks like, you could click on the little pull down “Paste Options” box and select “Match Destination Formatting.” But that’s an extra step.
Avoiding The Long Wait And Reformatting
If you don’t want to go through the hassle of having to do that or reformat the data, there’s a simple little trick to pasting the information into your spreadsheet cell. Just go up to the function bar, the space right after the fx, at the top of the spreadsheet after pointing to the cell where you want the data to appear. Paste the copied material into the function location.
When you do that, the original formatting of the data is not even taken into account, and the data appears just as if you had typed it in manually, just the way you want it.
Example:
Copy This From Web Page 
When you copy directly into a cell you get this.
Instead copy into the function line.
Then you get this.
One Caveat – Single Cell Copy Only
One caveat with this method is that this only works for single cell copying. If you have data that you want to show up in multiple cells, then this won’t work, because all of the data will be pasted into that one cell.
By: Tech Master Jim