Disable web content in Excel 2013

PrincessFrosty

Platinum Member
Feb 13, 2008
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www.frostyhacks.blogspot.com
We recently replaced all our desktops with brand new decent spec'd Win7 with office 2013, and I have to say excel 2013 is a nightmare.

Users continually run into issues, what they're doing is finding web content online, copying it from a browser and pasting it into excel, and ending up with workbooks that are full of web content.

Excel when copy/pasting this between worksheets or different files has to parse the web content and it can take i5's with 4Gb of RAM a good 1-2 minutes to parse even a small amount of web content, it's completely ridiculous. There's also instances where excel will appear to have closed after using one of these files but the exe is still running and trying to open other files results in excel throwing errors, like out of resources (which it's not), until you end the previous process.

Is there any way as an admin I can enforce some kind of group policy or force excel to accept text only under all circumstances, there has to be some way to control this as trying to teach users about pasting as text only or to paste into a txt file first to remove formatting isn't working, they don't get it.

Thanks to anyone who can help.
 

BarkingGhostar

Diamond Member
Nov 20, 2009
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I often run into issues in the workplace whereby someone fills out an Excel template form with data from another workbook, which isn't accessible at the time the form is being opened for import into a tool.

Why folks cannot just copy and paste data instead of linking it to cells in other workbooks (especially those that are formulas and not data themselves), is bewildering. As for web content I would suggest something differently than simply blocking content.

If there is content on the web that is comprised of text, graphics and images, they could try a simple screen capture (using Windows 7 Snipping Tool), cropping as needed and saving as JPEG, PNG, etc. amd importing more conventionally into the working document.

I do not know the nature of the work in your workplace that has users doing what they are doing, but then again maybe a bit of training is in order.
 

PrincessFrosty

Platinum Member
Feb 13, 2008
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www.frostyhacks.blogspot.com
By web content I mean they're normally copying the info of people like names, addresses, emails that kind of thing, they're not actually after the web content, just the text. But like with linking other workbooks, you can also link cells to data on the web which excel will go back to the web and fetch new copies of things change, so they'll copy part of someones name and end up with a few fields of text but then 1/2 a webpage worth of HTML behind that making the raw data in the excel file a nightmare, visibly it's just a few lines of text so they can't imagine what is wrong.

I really wish microsoft had a group policy object for office that allowed you to force users to only copy/paste basic text into excel files, but they don't from what I can find :/