Copy and paste data from Excel

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Mon, 02/29/2016 - 08:42 am

Hi,

I've been a low level user of Igor Pro for a few years now and have always been able to copy and paste data from an Excel sheet directly into an Igor table, with the column header from Excel automatically being made into a wave.

Now all of a sudden this is not happening. Instead multiple excel columns are being pasted into one (the first) Igor column. The only work around I've found id to make the waves manually, append them to the table and then copy and paste the data from individual columns. As you can imagine, this is tedious compared to being able to copy and paste a whole table from excel into Igor.

I've recently bought a new iMac and upgraded to Office 2016 for Mac and running Igor 6.37.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Matt
For some unfathomable reason, Excel 2016 on Macintosh does not put data on the clipboard as plain text. It puts it on the clipboard as RTF.

Igor does not look for RTF on the clipboard. It looks for plain text which is the lingua franca of data exchange.

The OS provides translation between the format on the clipboard and the format the a program, such as Igor, is looking for. Apparently there is something wrong or incompatible with the way Mac OS does that translation.

Why Microsoft stopped putting plain text on the clipboard is a mystery to me.

The workaround is to paste into TextEdit and then copy/paste into Igor.

Alternatively you can use File->Load Waves->Load Excel File.

February 29, 2016 at 09:51 am - Permalink