While it might initially seem like there wouldn’t be a lot of crossover in the types of information that you have in a Word document and an Excel spreadsheet, you might discover that you need to move data from one file to the other.
This is particularly likely when you’re dealing with a table in your document. Fortunately, there are ways to convert Word table to Excel so that you can analyze the data from your Word document using Excel’s powerful data tools.
How to Convert Word Table to Excel
Use these steps to convert a Microsoft Word table to an Excel spreadsheet.
Step 1: Open Microsoft Excel.
Step 2: Open the document with the table in Microsoft Word.
Step 3: Select the table cells in the Word document, then press Ctrl + C to copy them.
Step 4: Click inside the Excel cell where you want the top-left cell, then press Ctrl + V to paste it.
Our guide continues below with additional information on how to convert Word table to Excel data.
While Microsoft Excel features a number of advanced tools and settings to work with data in spreadsheet and table formats (there are even ways to convert text to numbers in Excel), Microsoft Word has some of those options, too.
If you’ve created a document in Microsoft Word that needed to reference some data, then it’s entirely possible that you have elected to present that data in a table format.
But you may have discovered that Word tables have a limited set of options for sorting data or performing mathematical operations on data, which could lead you to working with that data in Excel.
Fortunately you can convert a Microsoft Word table to Excel using a copy and paste method that gets the data into a spreadsheet with just a few steps.
Once you have that data in Excel you can read our Microsoft Excel Create Table Guide and see about some ways that you can make that data easier to use.
Now that you have completed our convert Word table to excel guide you can more easily move data between the two applications.
After you paste the data, a small Paste Options dialog button will appear next to it. You can click that button and select Match Destination Formatting to use the Excel formatting, or you can select Match Source Formatting to use the Word formatting.
Note that it’s possible your pasted table data includes some problematic characters or formatting that you may need to adjust.
For example, there may be extra lines in the cells which could cause empty rows in Excel, there may be blank spaces either preceding or following the cell data, or numbers may be formatted as text.
If you are having problems working with the data in Excel, then fixing these issues will typically resolve those problems.
See also
- How to subtract in Excel
- How to sort by date in Excel
- How to center a worksheet in Excel
- How to select non-adjacent cells in Excel
- How to unhide a hidden workbook in Excel
- How to make Excel vertical text
Matthew Burleigh has been writing tech tutorials since 2008. His writing has appeared on dozens of different websites and been read over 50 million times.
After receiving his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science he spent several years working in IT management for small businesses. However, he now works full time writing content online and creating websites.
His main writing topics include iPhones, Microsoft Office, Google Apps, Android, and Photoshop, but he has also written about many other tech topics as well.
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