LibAnswers: Student Digital Skills and Assistive Technology

You can cut and paste tables and diagrams from Excel into Word. When you paste, you can choose how it pastes into the Word document:

• Keep Source Formatting
• Use Destination Styles
• Link & Keep Source formatting
• As a Picture

You see the Paste Options when you paste (ctrl+V) or right-click in Word to paste:

Keep Source Formatting - retains the format from Excel, but you may need to resize the table in Word as the margins in Word will be that of an A4 portrait layout. If you have a wide table, you may need to use Section Breaks in Word to apply a horizontal page layout for that particular page.

Resize a table in Word by dragging the resize handle (small square) in the bottom right-hand corner of the table. When you hover over the corner, the mouse will change to a double-headed resize arrow (white or black double arrow) and you can then drag & drop to the table boundary to size. 

You can also resize the table's columns and rows, with the black double arrow that appears at the border of columns and rows. Drag to widen or narrow the width of a column.

Use Destination Styles - will paste the excel table using the styles from your Word document. So, in this example, the yellow fill of the header cells and the centered text of the headers have been removed.

Link & Keep Source formatting - will paste table using the formats from the excel document, but it will also link the table to the excel file. So, if you edit the values in the original excel document, it will be updated in the Word document.

As a Picture - will paste the excel object as a picture into the Word document. As it has been converted into an image file, it cannot be edited in Word. You can resize an image file by dragging the corner of the image.