458518 - Copied text will paste as plain text in MS word and excel 2003

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Zach]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3

When i go to copy either a table from wikipedia or formatted text from another site, absolutley none! of the formatting will show up in word or excel. excel will show the copied table from ff in excel with only a few cells. firefox is great, but everytime i need to copy text or tables i have to resort to IE. and i hate to have to do that. 
please help

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. go to a website with a table
2. say,, a list of something on wikipedia
3. select text
4. copy text
5. paste in excel 2003
6. volia
Actual Results:  
i just tried it and i copied a table with a 107 rows and a top category row and 9 columns and copied it into ms excel 2003 sp3 and got 7 rows and 1 column of unformatted text

Expected Results:  
exact formatting, complete with hyperlinks, colors, italics, and bold text, and correct cell bordering and 108 rows instead of 7, and correct number of columns

Comment 2

[David Charlap]

Also happens on Mac OS in 3.5.

A paste-special will let you get the table cells pasted correctly, but only when you paste as plain text, losing all the formatting.

In 3.0, it works correctly in Mac OS X.

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is a mass search for Firefox General bugs filed against version 3.0 that are UNCO and have not been changed for 200 days.

Reporter, please update to Firefox 3.6.10 or alter. Firefox 3.0 is no longer supported and is no longer receiving updates. After you update, please create a fresh profile, http://support.mozilla.com/kb/managing+profiles, and test to see if your bug still exists. If you still the bug, then please post a comment with the version you tested against, and the problem. If the issue is no longer there, please set the RESOLUTION to  RESOLVED, WORKSFORME.

Comment 4

[David Charlap]

I'm not the original reporter, but I can confirm that this is still present in 3.6.10 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10 GTB7.1)

Here are my steps to reproduce it:

1: Go to a URL with a table.  I used http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=goog
2: Ctrl-drag to select the quote table (Last trade, trade time, etc.)
3: Ctrl-C to copy
4: Go to Excel 2003 (in Windows)
5: Paste

The entire content ends up in one spreadsheet cell, with the (formatted) text from all the cells concatenated together.

If you replace step 5 with:

6: Edit->Paste Special (selecting "Text" or "Unicode Text" instead of "HTML")

then everything appears in cells, as expected, but with no other formatting.

I have also seen this on Mac OS X, with Excel 2004, but I am not currently at home where my Mac is so I can't post specific revision numbers for that platform.

See also my (marked duplicate) Bug 501795, which describes the problem I observed on the Mac platform with FF 3.5.  I just repeated its procedure, and the bug still exists there.

This bug was introduced in Firefox 3.5 and has persisted since then.  When I complained at the time, I was told that FF is behaving as designed, that it was Microsoft's bug, and that there would be no fix.  I hope this attitude will change in the future.  There is no corresponding bug in current releases of Internet Explorer or Safari.

Comment 5

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

I'm pretty sure there is already a bug on this...

Comment 6

[jwendt_97]

I installed Firefox 11.0 a week or so ago and all of a sudden the copy and paste function stopped working properly when copying formatted text within Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel 2007. I tried a number of options including replacing my keyboard (some Google searches said "stuck shift key" could be the problem,) rebooting computer, and doing virus scan. However when trying to isolate what had changed on my system in the last couple of weeks, the install of Firefox 11.0 was the biggest change. So when copy and paste within Microsoft Word and it failed to preserve text formatting, I shut down Firefox which was also open and the Paste function immediately start to work again. Right now the only Paste Special options I get when I have Firefox 11.0 open are "Unformatted text" and "Unformatted Unicode Text". As soon as I close Firefox, all Paste Special options appear. I just verified this as I entered this bug report.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

jwendt, I doubt your issue running v11 is the same, if you did not experience the issue using v10.

Comment 8

[Valentin Lorentz]

Same problem with Firefox 15.0.1 on Windows 7 and MS Word 2007.

Comment 9

[Valentin Lorentz]

Copying images to MS Word 2007 used to work, but it fails since update to 15.0.1 (I don't know what the the previous version number was).

Comment 10

[Valentin Lorentz]

(In reply to Valentin Lorentz from comment #9)
> Copying images to MS Word 2007 used to work, but it fails since update to
> 15.0.1 (I don't know what the the previous version number was).
EDIT: it still works with PNG images, but not with JPG ones.

Comment 11

[David Charlap]

FWIW, the bug no longer happens for me.  I'm running Firefox 15.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, pasting into Excel 2011 (version 14.2.4).

Given that others are seeing the problem with Firefox 15, it may have been fixed by a recent MS Office update.