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I would like to manually copy data from non-adjacent Excel rows (or columns) and paste it into a text editor.

So far I haven't found a way to do this efficiently. (I'm using Excel Home/Student 2013.)

For example:

  • In Excel, select (Ctrl+LeftMouseClick) rows 1, 5, 8, and 10
  • Copy (Ctrl+C)
  • In the text editor, paste (Ctrl+V) - you'll get ALL the data from rows 1 to 10

Cumbersome workaround so far:

  • In Excel, select (Ctrl+LeftMouseClick) rows 1, 5, 8, and 10
  • Copy (Ctrl+C)
  • Paste (Ctrl+V) somewhere else in Excel (e.g. empty extra sheet). You'll get 4 adjacent rows with data only from rows 1, 5, 8, and 10
  • Copy (Ctrl+C) again
  • In the text editor, Ctrl+V - you'll get the data from rows 1, 5, 8, and 10

Unbelievable that this seems not to be possible after more than 30 years of Excel development. Is there a reason why one can't do this directly?

Is there maybe nevertheless a trick to do this more efficiently?

Any ideas?

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  • @robinCTS, clearly your edited formattig looks better, but why did you remove "Excel" from the title? Because it is in the tags? – theozh Jul 21 '18 at 6:00
  • Well, I thought we were supposed remove all the tags from the title. Thanks to your bring it up, I did a bit of research and it looks like I was wrong! Duplicating the tags in the title is fine, as long as they are worked into the title organically and conversationally. Looks like I'll have to stop doing it :-$ Once again, thanks for bringing the issue to my attention. – robinCTS Jul 21 '18 at 6:35
  • Hmm. More research has turned up more posts which I now remember reading a long time ago, and which led me to always remove all the tags. It seems like there's no consensus. On the one hand is the camp advocating the complete removal of all the tags (in particular the programming language ones), and on the other is the group saying tags used organically are fine. IIRC last time I gave up researching. Maybe I'll try to dig deeper/look for newer posts this time ;-) – robinCTS Jul 21 '18 at 6:53
  • As detailed here I think this should work for copying outside of Excel, but I can't test until tomorrow to be sure. If someone else can test it sooner and confirm if it works then feel free to post as an answer. – Xantec Jul 22 '18 at 13:33
  • @Xantec, ok, it says: select your cells, press Alt+; and then Ctrl+C. With this it should not copy hidden cells. However, as I commented to the answer of Aganju below, Excel2013 seem to not copy hidden cells anyway. So, this shortcut seems to be useless at least for Excel2013. Independent of that, hiding unwanted rows first and make them again visible afterwards would be definitely more extra effort. – theozh Jul 22 '18 at 18:31
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It is an intentional 'feature'.

The hidden/unselected data is copied too, because gazillions of users have complained in the previous decades that they missed some data because some filter was still on and they didn't see it.

Personally, I agree with your desires - I have the same issue all the time. But we have to live with the limitations of millions of users that are not so sure what they are doing, therefore it is implemented this way.

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  • Oh, it's intentional? But why does it work with this intermediate copy&paste step within Excel? Btw, just tested, when I hiding/filtering the unwanted rows (e.g. 2,3,4,6,7,9) I can copy the desired data directly to a text editor. But hiding/filtering is even much more effort than just selecting the wanted rows or via the itermediate copy&paste step. Pretty inconsistent and painful! – theozh Jul 21 '18 at 5:41
  • FWIW, LibreOffice also can't do it. But there the result is different. I get only the first selected row in the text editor followed by empty cells (1024 cells in total). Again also pretty strange. – theozh Jul 21 '18 at 6:08

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