Gmail Formatting – How to Insert a Table

formattinggmail

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.

Best Answer

Update

A few years later now, and Google Inbox will let you paste a table directly from Google Sheets or LibreOffice. I assume it also works from Microsoft Office.

Original Answer

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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