If you select multiple columns and rows from ANY web page that displays multiple columns and rows. Then open a new sheet in Numbers and try to paste this data it pastes into one column. I have tried many options to paste this. The lame members of the community claim that you just select a single cell and then it works.
IT DOES NOT WORK USING COMBINATION!
When will Apple fix this HUGE BUG!
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 12.7
Hold your horses there a second...
You're wrong in stating that you can't copy data from ANY web page and paste it into Numbers. I tested this by creating a mini HTML document with a <TABLE> in it, and it copied exactly as I expected. You can try it yourself. Here's the HTML document I created - just save it as a .html file on your system and open in in Safari and you'll see:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<table id="mytable">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Letters 1</th>
<td>a</td>
<td>b</td>
<td>c</td>
<td>d</td>
<td>e</td>
<td>f</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Letters 2</th>
<td>g</td>
<td>h</td>
<td>i</td>
<td>j</td>
<td>k</td>
<td>l</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Letters 3</th>
<td>m</td>
<td>m</td>
<td>o</td>
<td>p</td>
<td>q</td>
<td>r</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Letters 4</th>
<td>s</td>
<td>t</td>
<td>u</td>
<td>v</td>
<td>w</td>
<td>v</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</body>
</html>
It's not fancy, but it is a valid HTML document/table, and if you copy it, it pastes into Numbers as you'd expect.
The problem comes with complex HTML documents that use various techniques to achieve their layout. They may be using <DIV> and <SPAN> tags rather than <TABLE>, stylesheets for formatting, etc.
I see what you're saying when it comes to these more complex layouts, where Numbers' best-guess as to layout doesn't meet your expectations, but it's not an HTML-aware application, so it's not designed to do that.
As a test, I took some table-like data from Yahoo! Finance's page on the S&P 500:
And pasted it into Numbers:
it seems to have parsed out the individual field labels and values into separate cells and identified (via left/right alignment) text values vs. numbers. Not perfect, but manageable.
For contrast, I tried Excel:
That's arguably worse, where it's melded the field label with its value and you have to jump through extra hoops to extract the pertinent information.
Either way, my point is that spreadsheets (both Numbers and Excel) are not HTML-based applications and there are bound to be some differences, and a lot of the details/success depends on how the source data is compiled and formatted.
Ultimately, if you're trying to get tabulated data from a web site, look for some kind of export option where the site provides the data in CSV or some more spreadsheet-friendly format.
Hold your horses there a second...
You're wrong in stating that you can't copy data from ANY web page and paste it into Numbers. I tested this by creating a mini HTML document with a <TABLE> in it, and it copied exactly as I expected. You can try it yourself. Here's the HTML document I created - just save it as a .html file on your system and open in in Safari and you'll see:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<table id="mytable">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Letters 1</th>
<td>a</td>
<td>b</td>
<td>c</td>
<td>d</td>
<td>e</td>
<td>f</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Letters 2</th>
<td>g</td>
<td>h</td>
<td>i</td>
<td>j</td>
<td>k</td>
<td>l</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Letters 3</th>
<td>m</td>
<td>m</td>
<td>o</td>
<td>p</td>
<td>q</td>
<td>r</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Letters 4</th>
<td>s</td>
<td>t</td>
<td>u</td>
<td>v</td>
<td>w</td>
<td>v</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</body>
</html>
It's not fancy, but it is a valid HTML document/table, and if you copy it, it pastes into Numbers as you'd expect.
The problem comes with complex HTML documents that use various techniques to achieve their layout. They may be using <DIV> and <SPAN> tags rather than <TABLE>, stylesheets for formatting, etc.
I see what you're saying when it comes to these more complex layouts, where Numbers' best-guess as to layout doesn't meet your expectations, but it's not an HTML-aware application, so it's not designed to do that.
As a test, I took some table-like data from Yahoo! Finance's page on the S&P 500:
And pasted it into Numbers:
it seems to have parsed out the individual field labels and values into separate cells and identified (via left/right alignment) text values vs. numbers. Not perfect, but manageable.
For contrast, I tried Excel:
That's arguably worse, where it's melded the field label with its value and you have to jump through extra hoops to extract the pertinent information.
Either way, my point is that spreadsheets (both Numbers and Excel) are not HTML-based applications and there are bound to be some differences, and a lot of the details/success depends on how the source data is compiled and formatted.
Ultimately, if you're trying to get tabulated data from a web site, look for some kind of export option where the site provides the data in CSV or some more spreadsheet-friendly format.
When you encounter a particularly ornery set of data that appears to be a table on a website but doesn't paste well as a table, there is now a new option that we didn't have before.
It's not perfect, but in my experience, it can save a lot of time.
Take a screenshot of the "table," upload that to your AI of choice, and ask it to give you "CSV suitable for pasting into a table in the Numbers app."
SG
People who design web pages don't often think about how their pages/data might get copy/pasted elsewhere, whether to a word processing app or a spreadsheet or whatever. Or maybe they do it this way on purpose. Their goal is to make the page look good and be easily editable for future revisions, not to make it easy to lift their data. I consider myself lucky when I am able to copy/paste from a web page (or a PDF) without it being a jumbled mess.
Numbers can't paste multiple columns and rows
