You copy a table from Word into Excel, and the row count jumps. Any cell with two lines in it has become two rows. Its neighbors now sit next to empty cells.
I tested every paste option Excel offers for this, and none kept the cells whole. The fix happens before the paste, in Word, and then once more in Excel.
Excel users have hit this for a decade, and one 2014 Super User thread has 284,487 views. On Microsoft Q&A, the same complaint about cells breaking into rows shows Same question (60+).
Why one cell becomes several rows
A line inside a Word cell ends with a break: a manual line break from Shift+Enter, or a paragraph mark from Enter. Excel reads each one of them as the end of a row, so the cell spills down into new rows. That is the whole fault.
Inside an Excel cell, a new line is a different character altogether, and it stays in the cell.
Copy such a cell back out to Notepad and the text arrives wrapped in quote marks, an Excel clipboard rule with three ways round it.
Microsoft documents the keys in its page on starting a new line in a cell: "Press Alt+Enter to insert the line break". The fix simply swaps Word's breaks for that kind before Excel ever sees them.
Status: tested 13 October 2026 with Word and Excel 16 on Windows 11, next to Microsoft's line break page and the fixes owners confirmed.
Ours: we built a three-row table in a hidden copy of Word, the way you would by hand. One cell had a manual line break in it, and another had two separate paragraphs.
A normal paste into Excel gave five rows, and so did Paste Special as HTML.
Paste Special as Unicode Text was worse. It also gave five rows, and the second line of each cell landed in the first column, under the item name.
1. Swap the breaks for a marker in Word
Select your whole table in Word, using the handle at its top-left corner, and press Ctrl+H. In Find what, type ^l for line breaks. In Replace with, type ^v, which Word turns into the ¶ sign, and click Replace All.
When Word asks you about searching the rest of the document, click No. Then run it once more with ^p in Find what, for paragraph marks inside cells. The end-of-cell marks are not touched.
I would run both passes every time, even if you only see one kind of break.
Reported working by the asker. The person who asked on Super User came back with this method as the accepted answer. "You'll have to do a bit of character replacement", they wrote.
Ours: after those two replacements, the same table pasted into Excel as three rows, exactly as many as the Word table had. Each split cell held its two lines joined by the ¶ sign.
2. Put the breaks back in Excel
Select your pasted cells and press Ctrl+H. In Find what, type the ¶ sign. Hold Alt and type 0182 on the numeric keypad, or copy one from a cell that holds it.
In Replace with, hold Alt and type 0010 on the keypad, which enters the line break character. Nothing appears in the box. That is expected. Click Replace All.
Ours: replacing the sign with that character put real line breaks back into both cells, and Excel switched on Wrap Text by itself. The table stayed at three rows.
No numeric keypad on your laptop? A formula does the same job. If the text sits in B2, put this in a spare column:
=SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(182),CHAR(10))Copy your results and paste them back as values. Ours: Excel kept the line breaks after paste as values, with no formula left behind.
3. Or let Google Sheets carry it across
Reported working by owners. With 30 votes, one answer pastes the Word table into a blank Google Sheet, then copies it from there into Excel. The line breaks survive. Cells stay whole.
The Microsoft Q&A asker used that route too. "It solved the issue", they wrote, while calling it "just a workaround". One commenter had to go through a Google Doc first, or the breaks vanished.
I would keep this route for tables without private data, since they pass through Google's servers.
One or two cells only?
Then you can skip all of this. Double-click the Excel cell, or press F2, then paste into it, and the lines stay inside that one cell. A volunteer moderator gave that answer on Microsoft Q&A. The asker's reply treated it as a fix for one cell at a time, not a hundred rows.
When the replace does nothing
It can fail for you too. A Super User commenter on Office 2013 still got extra rows after the replacement.
Check that Word really swapped both kinds: turn on Show/Hide (the ¶ button on the Home tab) and look for break marks left inside the cells.
If the text came from an email or a web page, paste it into a Word table first. Then run step 1 there.
For the opposite fault, where Excel cuts pasted text into columns, our fix for pastes that spread across columns has the fix.
Dates in your pasted table that refuse to sort are a separate problem too. Our page on Excel not recognizing dates turns them back into real dates.
Pasted rows that stay one line tall, with the wrapped text cut off, have causes of their own. We tested why AutoFit Row Height refuses to grow a row.
The Short Version
- Excel turns every line break in a Word cell into a new row, whichever paste you choose.
- In Word, replace ^l and then ^p with ^v inside the table.
- Paste into Excel, then replace ¶ with Alt+0010 on the keypad.
- No keypad: =SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(182),CHAR(10)), then paste as values.
- For one cell, press F2 and paste inside it.
Where to Next
Where did your table come from: Word, an email or a PDF? Each source breaks lines its own way, so tell me which one yours was.
Isaac Smith is the founder and editor of PC Glance, a website that covers computers, laptops, and technology. He is a tech enthusiast and a computer geek who loves to share his insights and help his readers make smart choices when buying tech gadgets or laptops. He is always curious and updated about the latest tech trends.