No longer able to post Excel tables directly

  • equusprints · Member ·

    With the classic editor I was able to copy a table in Excel and paste it directly into a new wordpress.com blog post, but the new editor just converts it to plain text, either formatted or unformatted depending on the toggle setting of the paste option.

    This has meant that I’ve had to save the Excel tables as webpages and copy the HTML content across and paste it into the HTML view, and spend five times as long stripping out all the formatting rubbish that Microsoft adds into an HTML format.

    Please advise how I can resolve adding spreadsheet formatted tables directly into Excel, as the process above quadruples the time taken on on weekly post from an hour normally to about 4 hours.

    (see seperate issues about tags)

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kevinbroom · Member ·

    Did you ever get an answer for this? I’m dealing with the same stupid problem.

  • dakisha · Staff ·

    I am going to tag this thread with modlook so that one of the staff members can assist :)

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi folks, thanks for the reports. We need a bit more information:

    – Can one of you (or each of you) link to an affected post? It can be a draft if you’d like.

    – To verify, were pasting into the old wp-admin editor before? If so, you can access that still by adding /wp-admin/edit.php at the end of your site url. Or were pasting into the “Beep Beep Boop” editor that we’ve had until just recently?

    – If one of you would be willing to upload the xml file as a sample, too, that would help.

    Thank you!

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Oh and one more thing: if you were using the classic wp-admin editor before, are you still using it now? Thanks for sending more info.

  • milnathort · Member ·

    I thought the problem was with wordpress.com deleting the button which allowed spreadsheet files to be imported..not so this was done some time ago by the company who created the editor plugin. My wordpress.org website uses the same editor plugin and this button is no longer available. However, the plugin does allow tables to be created and if wordpress.com could allow tables to be created on their editor this would be a big help – I now link large complicated spreadsheets to a page which viewers can download or view.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi @milnathort, are you using the editor at WordPress.com to manage your WordPress.org sites?

  • kevinbroom · Member ·

    Well, I was able to work around the limitation in the spiffy “improved posting experience” by going into WP Admin, but…no more. My attempt today is saved as a draft.

  • equusprints · Member ·

    I had been able to find and use the old wordpress.com classic wp-admin editor which still allowed me to paste the tables in from MS Excel. That functionality stopped earlier today, and it just posted the unformatted text content of the table instead – I got around that by pasting the table into MS word, and then copying and pasting that into the old wordpress editor which converted it to HTML correctly.

    However going back in to get a screenshot for this thread, I can no longer access the classic wp-admin editor only the dumbed down and useless new editor! Looks like I’ve got to find an external editor now which will allow me to paste the raw HTML into the wordpress.com thing – anyone have any recommendations?

  • kevinbroom · Member ·

    It’d be nice if they could fix this. Makes no sense that we can’t just copy & paste a table from Excel or another spreadsheet.

  • equusprints · Member ·

    http://html-online.com/editor/ works for me, so looks like I’ll be using that to create the HTML for my wordpress.com site going forwards

  • kevinbroom · Member ·

    That worked for me as well. Thanks for the tip.

    Would be nice if WordPress could restore this functionality…

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Folks, what’s happening when you try to access wp-admin?

  • equusprints · Member ·

    we used to be able to go from the classic wp-admin menu to that editor, but that changed this week to the new ‘improved’ posting experience. The one that won’t allow me to post tables, insert links to other posts, use other posts as templates, etc.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @equusprints, I’ll email you with a link I’ve used.

  • windrosefarm · Member ·

    @supernovia, have you made any progress on this? I used to make weekly updates by pasting an Excel table into the WordPress visual editor. I’m resorting to http://html-online.com/editor/ as suggested above (thanks @equusprints) but it’s an extra step and I also wish WordPress would restore the ability to paste a spreadsheet table directly.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @windrosefarm, you can follow this issue here if you’d like:
    https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/684

    In the meantime, please either use the fix you have in place, or use the older wp-admin editor for pasting tables. You can can access wp-admin by adding /wp-admin after the end of your site’s address like so:

    windrosefarm.org/wp-admin

    I’m going to go ahead and close this thread. Cheers, all!

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