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How can I create a table in a Gmail message? I've currently got the data in a Google Docs spreadsheet, but copying and pasting that into the Gmail editor just pastes tab-delimited columns, not a table. I've tried it in both the plain text and rich text editors.

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6 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

This Digital Inspiration blog post helped me out. Basically, you can copy content from any web page and paste it into the Gmail rich text editor. The editor will do its best to keep the formatting.

In my case, that meant that I had to do the following:

  1. Publish the spreadsheet to the web, but just publish the sheet with the data I wanted to copy;
  2. Get the link for the published sheet. If you don't want the whole sheet, you can specify the cells you want using the standard A1:C30 format;
  3. Open a new tab and paste the link;
  4. Select the whole table by typing Ctrl + A, and then copy it by typing Ctrl + C. I found that the pasting didn't work at all unless I copied the whole table;
  5. Go back to Gmail, make sure you're in the rich text editor, and make sure there are blank lines above and below your cursor;
  6. Type Ctrl + V to paste in the table.
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up vote 4 down vote

Create the table in Word then save the document as 'Single File Web Page'; select and copy the table ( Ctrl + C ); paste into your Gmail message ( Ctrl + V ).

It brings across the borders, shading, font size, etc. Column width appears to be determined by the number of characters in the column.

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up vote 2 down vote

Real solution:

  1. Open Outlook and create a new message.
  2. Copy the table from Excel or Word and paste it on the message.
  3. Send the message to yourself, on Gmail
  4. Open your message on Gmail and copy the table, or forward it.
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up vote 0 down vote

Another option: paste from Google Docs Spreadsheet into Microsoft Excel, then paste into Gmail.

(Of course, this assumes you have Excel installed. This may work for other spreadsheet programs as well.)

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up vote 0 down vote

I've found that Google made this thing called Web Clipboard to handle issues like this.

In the Google Drive spreadsheet you're working with, go to Edit → Web Clipboard → Copy Cell Range. Then open a Google Drive document and go to Edit → Web Clipboard and select the cell range you just copied to paste it.

Then do a normal copy and paste from this Google doc to Gmail. Not really pretty, but doesn't require doing anything outside your browser. It would be nice if Google integrated the Web Clipboard into Gmail.

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up vote -2 down vote

If you are copying from Excel, then you can do this in the below mentioned way.

  • Select the portion you want to copy from Excel to your Gmail
  • Click below the paste icon, where there will be an option of as picture
  • Select copy as picture
  • Select as shown on screen
  • Select Bitmap
  • Turn to Gmail
  • Paste
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