MS Excel pops up a dialogue box that lets you choose between maintaining source formatting or using destination formatting.
Does LibreOffice allow one to match destination formatting when pasting data into spreadsheet cells?
Please tag your question calc. A mention of Excel should not be a reason to use excel as a tag. The tag math is used for questions concerning the module for editing and rendering formulas which mostly are OLE embedded in Writer documents.
I have tried retagging “calc” repeatedly and saving, the old tags reappear each time.
Hmmm. There seems to be a bug in the askbot software (or in its configuration for this site).
I also just tried and couldn’t retag your question.
To retag, you need to make the changes, then press Enter twice. I have just done it.
If you use the Paste (Ctrl+V) command, the source format (attributes) is applied to the targec cells.
To get a detailed choice what should be pasted (and what not), use the Paste Special... (Shift+Ctrl+V) command.
Also can use Insert key (at least in LibreOffice 6.3.6.2 (x86); OS: Windows 6.1).
After fiddling around I discovered on a Mac it is shift+command+V, and then I need to select unformatted text.
Then LibreOffice crashes.
Next time around it recommends I save the .xls file in a format that I have never had to use with any other spreadsheet program.
Then I tried to update a chart…how ever tat works is not like MS Excel…I think I will go back to WPS Office. 
Forget LibreOffice if you want to use.one of the many xls or .xlsx file formats.
MS will always enforce incompatibility. It’s their raison d’être.
The internationally approved (and actually applicable) file standards for office applications are ODF (OpenDocumentFormat), among them ods for spreadsheet documents.
MS once announced to also support it. Of course. they only do just a bit of that.