line breaks ignored with plain text copy and paste

I'm seeing this problem, too, and it's a BIG PROBLEM!

I teach computer science at The University of Arizona.  I often want to paste code onto a slide.  With PowerPoint for Mac 2011, that works fine.  With PowerPoint for Mac 2016, multiple lines are squashed onto a single line, completely ruining the layout.

Although I see this squashing text pasted from Aquamacs 2.4 and iTerm 0.9.6, I've found that text pasted from Terminal 2.6.1 and TextEdit 1.11 does not exhibit the squashed behavior BUT blank lines are doubled.

Here's a bit of a workaround--the following pipeline takes the text on the clipboard, converts it to RTF, and then puts it back on the clipboard.  Line breaks are preserved, but empty lines are doubled.

pbpaste | textutil -stdin -stdout -convert rtf | pbcopy

Here's a shell script, with an embedded Python program (2 or 3), that seems to avoid the empty line doubling. I'll show it with cat:

% cat ~/sbin/ppt-paste

pbpaste | python -s <(cat <<X

import sys

sys.stdout.write(sys.stdin.read().replace("\n\n","<p><br>").replace("\n","<br>").replace(" "," "))

X) | textutil -stdin -stdout -format html -convert rtf | pbcopy

If you don't know how to work with scripts, here's a simple way to use it: First save it as ppt-paste in your home directory.  Then, start up Terminal.  Switch back to whatever app has text of interest and copy it to the clipboard.  Switch to Terminal and type 'bash ppt-paste'.  Switch to PPT and paste.  Repeat as needed.  Note that up-arrow in Terminal recalls previous commands, so no need to type 'bash ppt-paste' every time.

Richard - Not helpful... at all. Fix this function right away: It worked in the older versions of PowerPoint.

This is a known problem. Microsoft seems oblivious to the fact that there are other operating systems out here in the real world. Please click on the small smiley-face icon in the upper-right corner of the program screen, choose Tell Us What Can Be Better, describe the problem and submit. Sending the report routes it to the Mac programming team. I reported this issue a month ago, but have done so again.

Hi,

We got your concern. Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling Office 2016? Because some bugs and corrupted files gets fixed after reinstalling the software. Also, if you see any updates for Office 2016, make sure you run them.

Keeps us updated.