Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 28, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Sue is running into problems pasting tables into her documents. Often the pasted information (whether from another document or a Web site) will have tiny Roman numerals appear at one side or the other of the rows.
These numerals are actually characters which, in the font being used by Word, appear as the numerals. They may not appear as numerals in the source table, but automatically display in Word when pasted. They are in the source material (what you are copying from) but are not visible because the source material uses different formatting or character mapping than what Word uses.
There are only a few things you can try to get better results when pasting. The first is not use a standard paste operation. Instead, use Paste Special by following these steps:
The table is inserted, but as regular text. Columns are separated by tab characters. You can convert the text back to table format by following these steps:
Figure 1. The Convert Text to Table dialog box.
If pasting in this manner doesn't do the trick, then there is very little you can do—the source information includes the characters, and you can't instruct Word to ignore those characters when pasting. If the table you are pasting is large enough, you may want to use Find and Replace to get rid of the extraneous characters.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8763) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Unwanted Numbering on Pasted Tables.
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