While Microsoft Excel features a number of advanced tools and settings to work with data in spreadsheet and table formats, 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.

Use these steps to convert a Microsoft Word table to an Excel spreadsheet.

Open Microsoft Excel.
Open the document with the table in Microsoft Word.
Select the table cells in the Word document, then press Ctrl + C to copy them.
Click inside the Excel cell where you want the top-left cell, then press Ctrl + V to paste it.

After you paste the data, a small Paste Options dialog button will appear to the 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.

How to Convert a Microsoft Word Table to Excel

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