How to Insert an Excel Table into Word

Written by Nicole Levine, MFA

Last Updated: August 17, 2020

Is there data in your Microsoft Excel sheet that you want to display in a Word document? This wikiHow will teach you how to copy data from your spreadsheet to your Word document using the Microsoft Office desktop suite.

Steps

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1
Open your document in Excel. This method will walk you through the steps of copying and pasting data from Excel into Word using a Windows or Mac desktop application. You can either open your document from within Excel by going to File > Open or you can right-click on the file, select Open With, and then Excel.
- If you have data or a table of data, you'll be able to change how the pasted information appears within the Paste Options, all steps are otherwise identical if you're trying to copy and paste data or tables.
Using your mouse, click the first cell of data you want to copy and drag it to include the range (if you want to copy more than one cell).

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You can also right-click and select Copy.
You can open a document you've been working on or you can create a new document.
When you press the keyboard shortcut, the data you've copied from Excel will paste into the Word document.
The data you copied from Excel will appear in your Word document.
You should see a "Paste Options" drop-down next to your pasted data or chart. If not, you'll find "Paste Options" above the document editing space on the left side of the window under "Home."
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Choose your paste formatting. You'll see these options from left to right:
- Keep Source Formatting: Keeps data as it was formatted in Excel.
- Use Destination Styles: Updates the data to reflect Word's style. Use this paste style if you have data in a chart format with gridlines you want to keep.
- Link & Keep Source Formatting: Keeps the formatting as it was in the Excel document, however, the data in the pasted table will update any time you edit it in Excel.
- Link & Use Destination Style: Removes the original formatting and replaces it with that of your Word document. This also links the data to the original spreadsheet so that updating the spreadsheet will also update your Word document.
- Picture: Inserts the data as an image instead of a table and cannot be updated.
- Keep Text Only: Pastes only the text from the table and ignores all formatting (such as the lines in the table). However, each row of data in the chart/table is separated by a new paragraph and each column is separated by tabs.^{[1]
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Save your work. If you're using a Mac, press ⌘ Cmd+S and if you're using a Windows computer, press Ctrl+S.
- You want to save your progress after you paste data from Excel into your Word document.