Pasting from table into table

What I did:

  • copied text from a table in Pages (selected and copied all cells at once)
  • pasted into Agenda

What happened:

  • created an image of the table

What I expected:

  • a table to be created with the same number of cells, and text in appropriate cells

I also tried creating a table in Agenda, and then pasting into that table, but that just added text to one cell.

Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc):

There isn’t really a standard table representation that every app is using AFAIK. It is odd that you get an image instead of text, but I guess that is what Pages puts on there, so that other apps can get the correct table layout embedded.

I can look into it in future and see if there is something on the clipboard that Pages puts that we could use. Perhaps there is some table data there we could grab.

Thanks for the feedback!

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Hi, I am having a similar issue. I disagree that there is no standard table representation although I am not up to speed with the technical details.

I do see that I can create a table in e.g. Word, then copy and paste that succesfully into Evernote or Apple Notes. Table created in Evernote can be pasted into Apple notes and vice versa. Numbers to Evernote works, Numbers to Apple Notes, …

Clearly there is a standard way to indicate table content on clipboard, advanced styling notwithstanding.

Could you please reconsider this? Being able to paste a table from other applications would be a big plus for me, and I would assume for others too. Copying tables between applications is what most people would expect to “just work”.

Many thanks, a recently premium-subscribed newbie.

While experimenting, I also noticed that copying tables from Agenda into other applications does not seem to work as well. E.g. Agenda table copy -> paste into Word. Could it be that you need to support copy and paste of RTF clipboard items?

Regards

I think what you are seeing is just that our rich text pasting is not very good yet. Agenda, unlike Word/Notes etc is not a rich text editor. It is a styled text editor. We only really support pasting of text at this point. You can’t paste images or tables or even styles like bold and italic. We plan to address this in future. It’s one of those ones we just never seem to get to.

Going the other way, ie, copying from Agenda to other apps, should work. We support RTF there. Tables included. If that is not working, something is going wrong.

We have a new bug fix release coming in the next week or two. It includes some fixes for tables. Maybe that is better. I tested the release version, and indeed, somehow the tables were lost in the copy. A test of our development version shows that you can copy and paste them into Apple Notes. So I think it was a bug, and we have probably caught it.

Will have to wait for pasting into Agenda, but copying out should work in the next version.

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Thanks, good to hear that bug was fixed. Looking forward to the paste RTF-as-styled text functionality then.

Regards Wouter

Just want to raise another voice for some sort of table integration. I really, really miss the ability to paste a table in from other sources (Word) from my Evernote days.

We will see what we can do.

Note that we could support basic table copy/paste, but it will be basic. It is not so that if you paste a word table, you will get exactly the same table as in Word. Word supports many other features that a word processor has which we don’t have, like resizable cells, more formatting, content in cells etc.

Pasting into Agenda would just a basic table. If you need more than that, I recommend attaching the table file to Agenda as an attachment. (We have some nice improvements coming to attachments soon, such as editing of existing attachments.)

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Not looking to import formatting, but many of the meetings I attend at work have agendas that are created in Word and forwarded to participants. Those tables include columns for things like “topic,” “discussion lead,” “(time) length of discussion,” and a bland cell for notes. Being able to pull those tables in and then type my notes in the dedicated cell would be really helpful–if I’m just going to do that in Word and then attach the document to a note in Agenda, Agenda becomes nothing more than a place to store files, and I’ve got plenty of those.

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I see. Certainly, I can see it would be useful to paste tables in that case.

I don’t think you should think of it as a place to store files. The important thing in my view is that you have your document right with your notes. That is the gain over something like Dropbox or Files app IMO.

But we’ll see if we can add table pasting. Thanks for the feedback!

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I wanted to second this request, which I came here specifically to research. I have the exact same use case as allendkraus: agendas are distributed as a table (or sometimes an excel document), with a column for notes about discussion and decisions made. I would love to be able to paste those into Agenda and then take notes. I don’t care about the fancy formatting, just about preserving the basic table structure for note taking purposes. (I’m currently recreating the tables manually, but when I get to a big meeting with 20 decision items, that will be a real pain.)

You mean you want to be to paste a file in, like an excel file? We’ll see what we can do.

Ah, sorry, I wasn’t clear: I want to be able to select a range of cells from an excel document, copy them, and then paste them in and have those cells show up as a table. That works when pasting from excel into word, Onenote, apple notes, and Evernote.

OK, we’ll investigate and see what Excel format is being put on the pasteboard. Should be possible.

Any updates after a year? This is such a painpoint.

Not yet, we have it on our list to look at though.

In case it’s helpful:

I used Dropbox Papers (like GDocs) for the first time the other day.

I was amazed to find that I could copy a table from Apple Pages into Papers and it accurately re-created a real table. Admittedly it wasn’t a complex table.

It’s definitely possible, just needs time being put in, but that’s true for pretty much everything of course :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I would like to throw in that having the ability to paste even lines of text into a table and having each line turn into a row (even if that’s just one cell) would be pretty nice. Currently, Agenda just pastes the whole text block as multi-line content into the first cell.

We have some nice improvements to pasting into tables coming in the very next release, probably next week.

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