303164 - Cutting & pasting from a web page table into Excel doesn't work properly

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 137450

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Charles]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Cutting and pasting tables from certain web page tables into Microsoft Excel
doesn't work properly.  It works properly when cutting and pasting from Internet
Explorer, but not from Firefox.   

To demonstrate/reproduce this problem, perform the steps below using Firefox,
and then compare the results to what happens when using Excel.

Steps to reproduce the problem
------------------------------
1. Go to http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/boxoffice/
2. Select/highlight the first ten or so table rows in the Weekend Box Office
Actuals table
3. Hit <CTRL>C to copy the selection
4. Open Microsoft Excel 2003 (or whatever version you've got) to a blank sheet
5. Hit <CTRL>V to paste the selection

When the steps above are done using Internet Explorer, the selection pastes
correctly.  But when done with Firefox, the selection:
  a. dumps into a single cell in the spreadsheet, and
  b. the hypertext formatting is lost

As far as I can tell, the problem seems to happen when cutting and pasting from
tables in general.  I just used movies.yahoo.com as an example.

If not for this problem, I would use Firefox exclusively.   

I use Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2980.xpsp_sp2__gdr.050301-1519, but other
versions of IE seem to work too.

Feel free to contact me if you can't reproduce the problem or if you have questions.

Charles



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
To demonstrate/reproduce this problem, perform the steps below using Firefox,
and then compare the results to what happens when using Excel.

Steps to reproduce the problem
------------------------------
1. Go to http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/boxoffice/
2. Select/highlight the first ten or so table rows in the Weekend Box Office
Actuals table
3. Hit <CTRL>C to copy the selection
4. Open Microsoft Excel 2003 (or whatever version you've got) to a blank sheet
5. Hit <CTRL>V to paste the selection

When the steps above are done using Internet Explorer, the selection pastes
correctly.  But when done with Firefox, the selection:
  a. dumps into a single cell in the spreadsheet, and
  b. the hypertext formatting is lost


Actual Results:  
When the steps above are done using Internet Explorer, the selection pastes
correctly.  But when done with Firefox, the selection:
  a. dumps into a single cell in the spreadsheet, and
  b. the hypertext formatting is lost



Expected Results:  

The software should have paste the selection in Excel with the cells and
hypertext formatting intact.

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050802 Firefox/1.0+
ID:2005080214

Works for me when pasting into OpenOffice.org Calc.

Comment 2

[Charles]

This bug report refers to Microsoft Excel, not OpenOffice.org Calc.

Comment 3

[Adam Guthrie]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This bug report refers to Microsoft Excel, not OpenOffice.org Calc.

The point is that Firefox is copying the HTML correctly. It really doesn't
matter how Excel interprets what Firefox pastes; that's a bug in Excel.

Comment 4

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

good bug report, but it's a dupe so :)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 137450 ***

Comment 5

[Charles]

Thanks for pointing out that this bug is a dup of 137450.   Sory I missed that.
 And thanks for your fast response.

I couldn't help but notice that bug 137450 has remained unresolved for years,
though.   I hope that changes soon!  Like many others, this is the only problem
that keeps me from replacing Internet Explorer with Firefox altogether.   Fixing
this problem should be a high priority.   The Firefox market share is bound to
jump when this problem is finally resolved.