Microsoft Excel - Paste table into Word

The Microsoft Office software family is incredibly versatile and offers enough programmes to handle almost all tasks in the office, school or university. While most people use Outlook and Office very intensively and are proficient in them, Microsoft Excel leads a kind of shadowy existence for many. This is a great pity, because Excel is not only incomparably practical, but also quite simple Excel’s range of functions is huge – after all, the programme now has over 400 functions. Of course, not everyone needs to know these. Most people probably only need Excel to do some basic work like addition or percentage calculations. But even for simple work with tables, too many users use Microsoft Word – which is not even designed for this. Yet it is very easy to create a table in Excel, use the convenience of an intelligent table and integrate it into Word. If you want, you can also link the Excel table to a Word document and thus automatically transfer all changes in the Excel table to Word.

How to insert an Excel table into Word

If you want to insert an Excel table into Word, you can simply create a table in Excel, mark the fields that are to be inserted into Word, right-click on the marked cells and select „Copy“ (or copy with the key combination CTRL+C).

Then switch to the Word document, click on the place where the table should be inserted and select „insert“(or insert the content with CTRL+V). By default, the format of the Excel table is adopted in Word. If you have only entered values in cells in Excel, you will only get a list without table lines or coloured formatting. In Excel, you can simply select a formatting under „Format as table“ in the „Start“ tab in the „Format templates“ area.

To link an Excel table in Word

If you want to insert your values and data into Word sorted, you should create the table in Excel and then insert it into Word. This is because in Excel, with the help of an intelligent table, you can sort and systematise the values as you like. Once you have inserted the table in Word, you can only change the table in Word. Changes to the table in Excel are then no longer accepted. Therefore, it makes more sense to link the Excel table in Word. To link an Excel table with Word, first copy the contents into Excel as described above. However, you do not simply paste them into Word. Instead, move the cursor to where you want to insert the table. Then click on the small arrow under „Paste“ in the tab „Start“ in the section “ Clipboard.“

In the drop-down menu that opens, select the function „Insert content“ and a new window with this name opens. Here you select the option „Microsoft Excel workbook object“.

Click on „Ok“ toconfirm the selection and the Excel table is inserted into the document. If you now change something in the Excel table, the data is transferred to Word. To do this, you must save the changes in Excel and reopen Word so that the changes are displayed in the document.

If you often need tables for your work, you can save yourself a lot of work with this practical function.

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