Pasting Selected Records (Rows) from a Spreadsheet

You can paste the contents of selected records that you have worked on in a spreadsheet into a form grid.

This might be useful, for instance, when you have copied a set of records from the system into a spreadsheet for editing and now you want to return the contents of the records, with the changes, to the system.

To paste selected rows into a grid:

  1. Open the form into which you want to paste the records.

    To paste the records into a blank grid, you can do a Filter-in-Place query that you know will retrieve no records. This puts the form in "new" mode.

    See Finding Records with Filter-in-Place.

  2. In the spreadsheet, select the rows you want and press Ctrl+C to copy them to the system clipboard.

    Do not include the header row, if you have one. If you include the header, the paste operation probably will not complete successfully.

  3. In the grid, click inside the field at the location where you want to copy the data.

    In many cases, especially if you have a blank form in "new" mode, this is the first cell in the grid, though you can paste them in anywhere. Some tips:

    • Do not create a new row; the paste action will automatically create the row.
    • Do not click the row label. Instead, click inside any field on the row you want to replace or below which you want to append the new rows. If you are replacing multiple rows, the paste action will replace the row in which you clicked and each subsequent row, replacing the contents of those rows except for the read-only fields.
  4. From the Edit menu, select one of these options:
    • To insert new records at (below) the selected field, select Paste Rows Append.
    • To overwrite the content of existing records, beginning with the selected field, select Paste Rows Overwrite. This option only overwrites active fields. Fields that are read-only are left unchanged.
    Note:  Do not use Ctrl+V to paste the rows. Doing so causes the system to write the entire contents of the source row to a single cell. Use one of the options listed in this topic.