When I copy and paste data from one Excel sheet to another, why can't I paste and "Keep Destination Formatting"?

Hello Mark,

I'm Ibhadighi and I'd happily help you with your question. In this forum, we are Microsoft consumers just like yourself.

In Excel for Mac, the “Keep Destination Formatting” option is not available in the “Paste Special” menu. Instead, you can use the “Match Destination Formatting” option to paste data from one sheet to another while preserving the formatting of the destination cells.

Here’s how to do it:

Select the data you want to copy and press “Command + C” to copy it to the clipboard.

Click on the destination cell where you want to paste the data.

Right-click on the destination cell and choose “Paste Special” from the context menu.

In the “Paste Special” dialog box, select “Match Destination Formatting” from the list of options.

Click “OK” to paste the data and apply the destination formatting.

This will paste the data into the destination cells while preserving their existing formatting.

Best Regards, IBHADIGHI

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Thanks Sneha, but Command+Option+V just opens the Paste Special options and as such, has no option to apply destination formatting in my circumstance which goes back to the original question in this thread. I have as you suggested, provided feedback looking to the future, but for now I have ceded to current capability and have created a macro which converts the source data to the format I want in the destination sheet.

Thanks Bob but I've already added Paste and Match Destination Formatting to the QAT, but it remains greyed out and unusable despite having data in the clipboard. As an experiment, I also added a simple Paste command to the QAT and that was available and worked fine, so it was not something I was doing wrong. I just think now that it is not supported by MacOs, at least the version I'm running. I found somewhere random on the web mention that the clipboard is under control of the OS and not the software running on that OS. So maybe for some reason only known to Apple, they don't support pasting using destination formatting which just seems insane to me given in probably the majority of cases that is what you'd want to do.

Thanks Jim, but no that option is not there. I've tried that and all it offers is exactly that which is available for Paste Special. Thanks anyway. I'm becoming convinced it is not supported by the OS unless someone running MacOs Ventura 13.4 can confirm that have that option available.

Thanks for your reply Ibhadighi, but alas I don't have the "Match Destination Formatting"option.

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