[OS X TeX] How to copy and paste tables into LaTeX (from Excel or other programs)?

[Markus Hänchen]

Hi,

among the standard LaTeX operations creating tables is certainly one of 
the most cumbersome one. I am looking for an easy solution to copy data 
from an Excel table (or Igor, or Matlab) into a LaTeX document.

There are macros and the Matrix Panel in TeXShop to easily create a 
simple table but how to get the data in it?

My best solution so far was to create an Excel file having only one 
table and then save it as a csv file. Open the csv file with a text 
editor and do a find and replace of the comma with an ampersand. Select 
and copy into the .tex file.
This, naturally, could be done from any program that can export 
something like a csv file.

I would like to script that in a way that I ideally only have to select 
tabular data in any kind of program (even from a website), run the 
script on the contents of my clipboard, and paste the result into the 
.tex file.

Does something like this exist already?

Cheers,

Markus

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