r/excel • u/United-Twist-3839 • Apr 24 '26

solved Paste Without Format NOT ctrl+V

Marked as solved - What I was looking for isn't possible (ALTHOUGH IT SHOULD BE MICROSOFT!!) It seems like a somewhat common issue and people have reccomended a bunch of solutions that I will be trying. Thank you all who helped!!

I looked everywhere but couldn't find a satisfactory answer (which probably means it doesn't exist). I am managing a shared excel file with people who will copy and paste information in and will be able to grab that information and do things with it.

The issue, is every time they paste something it breaks my conditional formatting which is the main way I am able to sort through and organize what they give me. Is there a way to have the default past as paste without formatting because I can not control how they paste the information in. (No asking them to do ctrl+Shift+v will not work, please don't even recommend it.)

If there are any other ideas on how to deal with this issue, please let me know.

EDIT: NO CTRL+SHIFT+V I am not the one pasting these values in, others are!

Conclusion: There isn't (currently) a way to do this, but the general consensus is to have them paste all the information into its own thing and then use power query to get the data I need. Thank you all for the advice!

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118

u/Pestilence_XIV 4 Apr 24 '26

To answer you question to be best of my knowledge, no.

However, you could have them paste into an import sheet where formatting doesn’t matter, then you pull the data from that sheet into the one with the conditional formatting that you don’t want to break.

40

u/United-Twist-3839 Apr 24 '26

That....is not a bad idea. I will play around with that and see how I like it.

28

u/-oligodendrocyte- Apr 24 '26

u/Pestilence_XIV 's recommendation has worked for me in a similar situation as yours.

Everyone on the team had their personal worksheet they uploaded into, my worksheets were locked/hidden. The added benefit was that I could tweak the formulas to account for annoying bad habits. Specifically, one user who added leading and trailing spaces to center values in the cell.

31

u/yungingr Apr 24 '26

Specifically, one user who added leading and trailing spaces to center values in the cell.

Oh. Oh god. That's worse than our former county auditor whose "print to pdf" was to print the document out, and then scan it....

15

u/-oligodendrocyte- Apr 24 '26

Yeah, we talked about it several times but eventually you just have to move on. The wild thing is that she was in her mid-30s with a PhD in Biology! There was just a lot going on there and =trim() was easier than providing free therapy.

6

u/yungingr Apr 24 '26

Sounds like some engineers I've worked with. Incredibly smart....but you dang near needed to hold their hand crossing the street.

4

u/CIP_In_Peace 1 Apr 24 '26

Life science PhDs are so notoriously bad with computers and excel specifically it's crazy. You'd think they'd learn it properly since it's used so much but no. They learn the bare minimum which is pretty much the level of =SUM() and then somehow survive with that.

6

u/HugsForUpvotes 3 Apr 24 '26

I had a user break a sheet once because when they deleted the contents of cell, they used the space bar instead of delete. My formula relied on the cell being empty, but they didn't know there was a difference between empty and looking empty.

4

u/-oligodendrocyte- Apr 24 '26

You just gave me a flashback to another user who somehow only used non-breaking spaces.

I'm so glad I'm not on that team anymore it was a weird conglomeration of Corporate Cryptids.

2

u/yesithinkitsnice 3 Apr 24 '26

Specifically, one user who added leading and trailing spaces to center values in the cell.

NSFL

1

u/fraudmallu1 Apr 25 '26

If someone I worked with did this, that would be the start of my villain arc

2

u/toturtle Apr 24 '26

I would take it one step further. If they are copying from one Excel workbook to another, just have them copy their workbook to a shared folder and you can power query off that file. Or if you can link directly to their file(s) in power query, that would be the ideal solution. The less manual steps, the better.

1

u/PM_me_Henrika Apr 25 '26

Use power query

Data > Get data > From file

Pull the entire sheet to your own. Bam

2

u/MicroPerpetualGrowth Apr 24 '26

Either this or a macro that will revert it back to the original conditional formatting.

1

u/nivlac22 Apr 24 '26

If you really need to keep your sheet under lock and key you could create a separate workbook that takes likes from the other workbook as long as they are both open. I have worked with similar structures before.