Copying a line of cells will automatically divide them with a tab when pasted into any other document (notepad, notepad++, writer, website forms, etc):
cell1[tab]cell2[tab]cell3
Is there a way to modify this to change tabs for spaces, or remove the tab altogether?
The Copy surely doesn’t create tabs as separators. If you Paste the copied content somewhere it depends.
Pasting into a different place in a spreadsheet should fill cell by cell.
Please edit your question and add information about your intentions / usage / workflow.
Hi Lupp, I’ve modified the post to specify Copy will add tabs when pasting into any text field that is not Calc. I’ve tested it on notepad/web/writer and even this website and it definitely seems to separate the text through tabs for some reason.
When you copy something in an application, representations of it go into an intermediate world, the “clipboard”. It is the receiving application that decides which supported “flavor” to insert. If there are several possibilities, it can ask the user which one he(f/m) prefers. A plain text program does not know cells, so it cannot insert a faithful copy of a spreadsheet area. A full-blown word processor that also knows tables can try to create a table, but of course it cannot replicate many of the capabilities of spreadsheets.
To insert a raw concatenation of former cell contents/results will very rarely be what the user expects.
Please do not repeat what you not want (the tabulators), but tell what you want/expect.
That is fundamental to spreadsheets, cells are separated. It is not copy adding the separation, it already exists.
In writer, use Find and Replace with Regular Expressions to replace tabs with spaces.
In Find enter \t
In Replace enter a normal space with spacebar key
Tick Regular Expressions
Click the Help button on F&R dialogue for more information
In Notepad the tabs are converted to four(?) spaces by Notepad. You could copy that text to Writer and Find and Replace four spaces by one space, or more generically replace two spaces with one space until there are only single spaces left.
[Edit]
The easiest way is enter in cell 4 (assume A4) the formula =A1&" "&A2&" "&A3 and copy just cell A4
Well, I had missed the keyword “spaces” in the question.
Hmmm. Isn’t that a bad idea?
It’s common that spreadsheet cells containing text also may contain spaces. If you replace the cell separation with spaces, you can’t any longer find out what originally belonged to a single cell.
What was the reason to collect your data or formula results in a spreadsheet? Is the organisation in columns and rows completely obsolete?
For copy/paste I know no solution, but, if you saveAs .csv file you can edit filter to use a space instead of a tab.
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And any sophistcated editor will allow replacement of Tab with Space, but it is an additional step…
There is no way to modify the separator when Calc places contents from different cells on the clipboard.
=A37&B37&C37&D37 will concatenate the contents without separator.Table – Convert – Table to text, you can convert the table to text and decide on the separator.Thanks Vanadium, 1st and 3rd are working smoothly depending on where I need to output them.