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Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word

How to copy a table from Wikipedia to Word or Excel.

Standard web tables can be copied from a web page to Word or Excel, but not many tables on Wikipedia pages. Office-Watch.com shows you how to do it. Even if you’re not copying from Wikipedia, we’ll show you some useful Word skills.

Tables on Wikipedia and some other web sites have additional code that confuses Microsoft Office. If you try to paste the web table into Excel, all you get is unreadable confusion instead of a Word table.

Whenever this happens, you need to find out what it really being pasted. To do that, switch to Word and paste the web content into a blank document with all characters on view.

Create a blank document in Word

Copy the web table from a page and use Paste Special to paste it into Word using the ‘Keep Text Only’ or ‘Unformatted Text’ option.

Word paste keep text only image from Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word at Office-Watch.com

Word Wikipedia pasted table image from Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word at Office-Watch.com

If the pasted content looks like this:

Word Wikipedia pasted table default image from Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word at Office-Watch.com

You’ve chosen the default Word paste, not the plain text paste.

Now turn on the Show All option (if it isn’t already). This will show you the hidden characters separating the data / cell elements. Word 2010 and Word 2007 – on the Home tab, Paragraph section look for the ¶ (pilcrow) icon.

Now you can see what formatting marks are lurking in between the data. In the case of a Wikipedia table you might see something like this …

Word pasted table show all image from Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word at Office-Watch.com

Those arrow marks are tab characters. Now we know that tabs separate the data on each line we can use another Word feature, converting text into a table.

Select all the pasted ‘table’ data then choose Insert | Table | Convert Text to Table

Word convert text to table image from Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word at Office-Watch.com

A dialog will appear to let you choose some options for the new table.

Word convert text to table dialog image from Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word at Office-Watch.com

Make sure ‘Tabs’ is chosen as the separator. Word will try to guess the number of columns of data to create. In our tests this guess wasn’t always accurate so it is worth double-checking before clicking OK.

Word will convert the selected text into a table like magic.

Now you have a table you can select it all and copy into Excel.


Tidy up

Before you use the table, look through it for any glitches. For example this extra row in the table can be deleted with the text moved to the last column of the previous row.

Word pasted table result image from Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word at Office-Watch.com

There are some footnote numbers ‘Francen3’ that you’ll need to remove or convert into Word footnotes.

In this example, the name of each country has a space before it. That might not be a problem, but if you need to remove the extra spaces you’ll need to return to the tab delimited text version so you can use the Replace command to replace the characters ‘Tab and Space’ (Code: ^t^w ) with just ‘Tab’ ( ^t )then do a ‘Text to Table’ conversion.

Word replace tab and space with space only image from Copying tables from Wikipedia to Word at Office-Watch.com

 

Once you have the table looking OK you can copy it into either another Word document or Excel.

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