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I'm trying to copy a regression table into Google sheets but have encountered a problem where it converts numbers wrapped in parentheses (in this case standard errors) to negative numbers.

For example (0.02) will become -0.02. I have encountered this issue in Excel and found solutions but cannot find a solution for Google Sheets.

Tom Davidson
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2 Answers2

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Have you tried changing the format of the cells that may contain your errors to 'Plain Text'?

You can do this by selecting the cells and then going to Format -> Number -> Plain Text

Brad Mostert
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I have found a work around but it is not ideal. If you select the cells you wish to paste into, click the "More formats" button, and select the "Plain Text" option you can then paste the data into the spreadsheet as plain text.

The drawback here is that none of the data are recognized as numbers, making it difficult to conduct any other operations on them.

Tom Davidson
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  • I found another unconventional way to stop this from happening. I pasted a blank unicode character along with the number in brackets (copied it from https://emptycharacter.com/).This stopped the numbers from changing into negatives. Not sure how helpful this is in your case , hence commenting. – Vishnu Joshi Jul 22 '21 at 09:10