[Solved] Paste Special: Unformatted not shown

[m13m13]

I wanted to paste some text I had copied from a few cells on the same spreadsheet where I was trying to paste them. There weren't any formulas or macros involved; it was pretty straight-forward. The problem was that I didn't want the pasted text to wipe out the background color I had formatted the target cells with. A little research made the solution sound easy; I just needed to select "unformatted text" on the Paste Special dialog. Well, maybe that option used to be there, but it's not showing up on my version 4.1.15 of OpenOffice. I must have found fifty different web pages saying the same thing, "Just click on 'unformatted text...' " Even this forum had that same advice (on older posts).

Well, I finally figured out that what I needed to do is uncheck "Paste all" and instead check "Text," "Number," or whatever form of data I was trying to paste, but most importantly, make sure "Formats" wasn't checked. So, that fixed the problem. It just blows me away that I couldn't find a single web page with that solution. Maybe everybody figured out you wouldn't be so stupid as to not figure that out in the first place. I don't know.

I'm just putting this here in case somebody else is having this problem.

[FJCC]

I think what you are seeing is the difference between copying text and copying a cell. If you copy a cell or group of cell and perform Paste Special, you get options for Text, Number Formats, etc. If you double click on a cell to put it in edit mode, select the text in the cell, copy it and Paste Special that, you get the option to past Unformatted Text. You can also get that option by selecting text from a web page or other non-Calc source.

[m13m13]

I tried that, and it appears that you're correct. I suspected it had something to do with exactly where the clipboard material came from. I had tried it with some text I copied from various sources, and I DID notice the pasting dialog options were a bit different. Thanks for your comment.