Copying All Tables to a New Document

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 26, 2020)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365

Tables are a great way to present many types of information. In fact, I've seen some documents that consist almost entirely of tables. If you do a lot of work with tables, you may (at some point) want to copy all the tables from one document to a brand-new document. This could be helpful if you have tabular information that needs to be available in the new document, but you don't need the rest of the information from the original document.

The easiest way to do this type of copying is by using a macro. Fortunately, all the tables in a document are made available to VBA through the Tables collection. That means you can step through each item in the collection (each item will be an individual table) and then copy it.

Sub CopyTables()
    Dim Source As Document
    Dim Target As Document
    Dim tbl As Table
    Dim tr As Range

    Set Source = ActiveDocument
    Set Target = Documents.Add

    For Each tbl In Source.Tables
        Set tr = Target.Range
        tr.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
        tr.FormattedText = tbl.Range.FormattedText
        tr.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
        tr.Text = vbCrLf
    Next
End Sub

The macro, once run, creates a brand-new document (Target) and copies the tables from the original document (Source) into the new one. (The source document is whatever document was active when you ran the macro.) The macro places a blank line between each table in the Target document. If you don't want the blank line, then remove or comment out the line just before the Next statement.

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the WordTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13338) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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