# Word - alignment of pasted text with line breaks is altered in table cells



## longtalker (Oct 28, 2008)

I encountered the following situation in Word 2007: 
- I had a table whose Alignment was set to Left;
- I copied some text from a PDF article (Adobe Reader) that was laid out on 2 columns; the line breaks are copied as well, such that when you paste the text somewhere else, you have to manually delete all the line breaks (carriage returns) yourself
- When I pasted the text into one of the table's cells, the text was automatically alligned Right, with the exception of the last line (which is actually a paragraph of its own, because of the line breaks). Other times the different lines (i.e. paragraphs) are Centered, but never Left aligned, as they should be.

I have to do this operation many times, and it's irritating enough to have to delete all the unnecessary line breaks, let alone to also have to reenforce the Left alignment of the pasted text after each Paste operation.

Word is set up to paste text from other programs by keeping text only, so any alignment setting from Adobe Reader should not count.

If I paste text that doesn't have line breaks in it (as a result of 2-column page layout for example), then the pasted text looks fine in the WOrd table, i.e. it is aligned Left as it should be.

Also, if I paste the text with line-breaks outside of a table, the default Left alignment is maintained for all lines (paragraphs), so it's only when I paste into a table cell that the alignment is altered.

Can anyone suggest why this is happening, and how I can get text that has line breaks in it to be pasted in tables without bringing in a different alignment? Anticipated thanks!


----------



## macropod (Apr 11, 2008)

Hi longtalker,

Most likely, the paragraph alignments are due to formatting within the PDF or are due to the underlying paragraph Style that your table cell is based on. You should make sure the underlying paragraph Style for your table cell has all the correct attributes and has not had them overidden by 'hard formatting'. If the problem persists, try pasting from the PDF as unformatted text (via Edit|Paste Special).


----------

