Pasting Selected Records (Rows) from a Spreadsheet

You can paste the contents of selected records that you have worked on in a spreadsheet into a grid.

This might be useful, for instance, when you have copied a set of records from the system into a spreadsheet for editing and now you want to return the contents of the records, with the changes, to the system.

NOTES: When pasting data into a grid, keep the following in mind:

The spreadsheet and the grid must follow the same data scheme. Some grids contain hidden columns. Columns in the spreadsheet must exactly match the visible columns in the grid. The first column in the spreadsheet must correspond to the first column in the grid; the second column in the spreadsheet must correspond to the second column in the grid; and so forth.
Normally, if you originally copied from a grid into the spreadsheet, the data schemes are identical. However, in some cases, this is not true because the order of the grid may not match the order of the collection that was exported; in those cases, you must reorder the columns in the spreadsheet to match the grid order.
Be careful, too, when ordering columns in the grid view. Because the paste order matches that of the spreadsheet, if you paste a value into a column that affects the value of a later column, then when the later column value is pasted, it might overwrite the desired (calculated) value with the value from the spreadsheet.
You can insert rows from a spreadsheet as new rows in a grid, or you can overwrite existing rows in the grid with rows from the spreadsheet. The overwrite operation skips columns that are read-only, leaving the current values unmodified.
This means you might have to take other steps to get the appropriate values into those read-only fields.
The form might validate each cell when you paste rows into a grid. Invalid data in cells in the spreadsheet or empty cells that correspond to required fields in the grid might generate validation error messages. Note that if you edit a cell in response to a validation message during the paste operation, the paste operation ends with the current record. Therefore, we recommend that you respond No to all prompts for validation during the paste operation, and then go back after the operation is complete, to edit these fields.
The maximum number of rows you can paste into a form at one time depends on the memory resources of your computer. Pasted rows are held in memory until you save them. You can avoid out-of-memory conditions and related errors by dividing a large number of records into smaller batches and then pasting and saving each batch separately.
To ignore the values in some cells of the spreadsheet and replace them with the default value in the application, type [null] in those cells of the spreadsheet before copying the rows into the grid. Do not leave the cells blank. Be sure to include the brackets and use lowercase.

Pasting Selected Records (Rows) from a Spreadsheet

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