How to paste table without nesting in MS OneNote?

Question

If I select and copy part of the table and then select another part of the same size, then I get nested table

How to avoid this? I want cells to paste 1:1!

Answer 1

So a couple of caveats:

1. This will only work in the OneNote desktop app (will not work in O365/webapp).
2. The amount of column cells from source must match the amount of column cells that exist in the destination.

With that said, if you're wanting to only copy a few cells out of the total, and both the source and destination tables have the same amount of columns, just copy all data from said columns and delete whichever cells of data are not necessary in the destination table. The data can be pasted either right below the table (and it will append itself to the bottom of the table) or in the first column of an empty row. At least in OneNote, you can click-drag vertically without it grabbing the entire row below/above so it doesn't generate a ton of clean-up work for you.

Apologies that this isn't a straight-forward approach, but it seems to be the only one that exists at the moment.

Answer 2

I have the same problem. My workaround is to copy and past into Word. Then paste the cells in the appropriate cells. OneNote is quite table friendly but I find it more efficient to manipulate tables in Word or Excel.

Answer 3

This is all about matching the number of rows or columns. For rows I find that if you match the number of columns then paste into a cell in the left most column of the destination it will insert the pasted row above your cursor.

Similarly for columns the destination table must have the same number of columns, and I have found you need to have the cursor in the bottom row. This will insert or append the pasted column(s) to the right. (Note: I did find it would not do it for me if I was adding one column to a single column table).

(this is in OneNote 16.41 on mac)

Answer 4

Right click the OneNote table and select "Convert to Excel", table in the OneNote will be converted and opened in the new Excel sheet (when you select Edit button).

Answer 5

Right click the OneNote table and select "Convert to Excel", table in the OneNote will be converted and opened in the new Excel sheet (when you select Edit button).

Answer 6

I just figured out how to do that. Using the instructions below, you can copy data from excel, word, one note etc. and it will work just fine and will not paste as a nested table inside the OneNote table.

Please follow the steps below:

1. Check the number of columns in your OneNote table (say N)
2. Select the cells in the table you want to copy into the OneNote table. If the table from where data has to be copied has N columns then fine else expand the selection to N columns. e.g. if the one note table has 4 columns and the table from where you want to copy has just 3 columns - you need to copy an additional column (i.e. 4) to match the number of columns in the One Note table
3. Copy selection / Ctrl + C
4. Go to one note table and select the entire row (all columns) at the bottom of the table. Only 1 full row needs to be copied irrespective of the number of rows you want to copy.
5. Paste data / Ctrl + V
6. You will see additional rows created in the OneNote table and all the data will be populated as per the columns in the table from where the data was copied.

Hope that helps!

Answer 7

This is the best guidance on the OneNote nesting issue. I think it's worth making it clear that you must select the entire column to make this work. I've tried only a portion of a column and it did not work for my desktop version. I wish you didn't have to select the entire column, it makes the utility less useful. My three cents.

Answer 8

It worked but... I had to make some corrections to the data format.

Problem: I had a table with 80 rows and a column that contained dates formatted as "8/10/2024" and I wanted to change that to "2024-08-10". I selected the entire column and pasted it in to Excel and right clicked the column, Format Cells, Number, Date and selected that yyyy-mm-dd format but...

• A cell had several line feeds (Enter character x3) and excel merged those three rows into a "merged cell" which was causing the table to nest when pasted back into OneNote. I repaired it by deleting the merged cells and inserting a new cell.

Then I selected and pasted into OneNote and everything worked perfect.

• Optional Step 1: to help verify that the dates were reformatted correctly I selected the column in OneNote and pasted a copy right next to it. After pasting the correctly formatted dates from excel this made it easy to verify that there were no errors.

• Optional Step 2: If you are having problems paste in to Word first because when I did that I saw a strange kind of shadow column to the right of the main column. This led me back to examine that entry in Excel which is where I discovered the "Merged Cell" and this mismatch changed the shape of the column and when pasted in OneNote resulted in the dreaded "Nested Column/cells".

• Final thoughts: The Paradox The fewer the cells the less value in doing this but it is easer. The more cells the greater the time saving but the more likely you are to have a cell that contains other data types - in my case it was two out of 80 cells and only once cell that actually was causing the dreaded "nested table".

Answer 9

I have realised that this goes awry when the source and destination tables don't have the exact same number of columns. Thus I just copied the appropriate number of cells from the source table and pasting it works.

Answer 10

Some terminology is getting mixed up in the previous answers. To have one or more columns copied or pasted from another table and appended to the right of an existing table without becoming nested, both tables must have the same number of rows.

I needed to copy two columns from one table to another. Both were basically the same and kept nesting until I realized the target table had an additional row that the old table didn't. Removing that extra row allowed everything to work properly.