Another reason to use Firefox….
Copying and pasting data from online tables into a spreadsheet is often fraught with frustration, often centering around invisible characters or custom formatting in web tables. And then there's the problem of getting data from non-adjacent cells. Some fine fellow — actually, it is Davide Ficano — has written a slick extension for Firefox to minimize these, um, challenges. See:
“Table2Clipboard – Firefox Extension
Table2Clipboard 0.0.1, by Davide Ficano, released on January 13, 2006
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Quick Description
Mozilla applications allow to select rows and columns from a table
simply pressing Control key and picking rows/columns with left mouse
button.
The selection can be copied to clipboard but the original table
disposition is lost making ugly results when you paste the text on
datasheet applications (eg excel).
If you want to paste data in Microsoft Excel on OpenOffice Calc with correct disposition simply use Table2Clipboard.
Pasting in plain text editors is also supported as CSV file (but you can change rows and columns separators from option dialog)