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Hello I wonder how is it possible Microsoft still gets away with this problem. I think it can cause big trouble to many people who just don't notice this behavior.

If you select a column of cells, but then exclude some of those with ctrl+click and you copy, paste it into notepad or MS Word, you WILL have also the cells you excluded if they were in the middle! If you are aware of this "feature" you will do a workaround by pasting the selection into new excel sheet and then copy it again from there. I think this is an unacceptable bug. Any ideas if there is some settings to make this behave properly or I just have to remember this?

I just tried how OpenOffice Calc behaves and unlike excel it only copies the selected cells until the one which was excluded. Still not right but better, because you will clearly see that it's not what you wanted so there is much smaller chance you will make a mistake.

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  • As far as I can tell, it's not possible. But even if it were, I think it would cause empty rows to appear, especially if trying to copy from a Microsoft product to a non-MS product. One possible idea is this... create a macro that would copy your data and paste elsewhere in excel. Then either the same or another macro would copy that newly pasted data to your clipboard. Wonky, i know, and not sure if it saves time over just manually doing it.
    – Isolated
    Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 14:32
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    I don't get it. Imagine situations like some excel list of employees. Boss' assistant goes through a list and wants to copy and paste some names into email. If she selects most of them excluding just a few, how likely is it that she doesn't realize this and makes a mistake?? MS or non MS product don't matter. Word behaves the same.
    – Vitas
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 13:28

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Yes, I agree this needs to be fixed. The only solution is to make your selections individually. Unlike any other application in existence, Excel makes sure that you don't get what you actually selected into your clipboard. I can't tell you why they designed the software this way. Only causes errors and problems, and is not efficient what so ever.

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I did some tests, but I can't reproduce your problem.

After you copy (you have excluded some cells), will the unselected cells also show the status of being copied?

As long as these cells are not displayed as being copied, they will not be copied.

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    please read my post carefully. You are copying it from excel to excel! There is no problem with that
    – Vitas
    Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 11:17

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