How to get rid of extra spaces when copying a table from Excel to Powerpoint

I have been facing this problem from times immemorial. Whenever I copy a table with data, either numbers or text, from Excel to Powerpoint, most of the time I get numerous spaces before the data, which never existed in the Excel file.

It takes a lot of time to get rid of them. I follow some of these, with mixed success:

1. Using the replace function, but mostly it gets rids of all the spaces among other text also

2. Manually deleted each space

3. Trying to keep the numbers in simple Number format, eliminates space before numbers, but this does not solve the spaces before text issues

I've faced this with Office 2007, 2010, and 2013.

Solution 1:

This is not a bug in Excel or PowerPoint, I think I was able to figure out the reason for it and the solution was not far off.

What I think is happening is the date/text/negative/positive formatting that you are using in Excel is causing this.

For example, in the tables I was using, I wanted:

1. Negative numbers as : (52.3) instead of -52.324
2. Positive numbers as : 23.7 instead of 23.687
3. And Zero as : - instead of 0.0

Thus when going into the 'custom' Category in 'More Number Formats' dialogue box, the format was showing as:

_(* #,##0_);_(* (#,##0);_(* "-"??_);_(@_)

So when pasting the number into PowerPoint, I guess it was saving all the character spaces, so I read on the custom formats at Microsoft's Create or delete a custom number format, which I suggest you should too, in case you want to be creating your own custom formats.

And then I replaced that horrible looking text with:

*0.0;(0.0);-*

And voila!

Hope this helps anybody who still faces this issue. :)

Solution 2:

Try creating a blank table in powerpoint and then copy paste the contents from Excel.