What you describe, literally, in your numbered example set of actions is how Excel has always worked.
When you copy a CELL, whole, Excel will only paste it whole, not inside a cell as part of that cell's contents. Excel has ALWAYS required the "cumbersome" workaround you allude to in order to paste into a cell's contents vs. pasting a whole cell over a whole cell.
Nothing wrong with Ctrl-V in this post.
The "fault" is with Excel. Excel is the one failing to honor the Windows clipboard paradigm.
Normally I would suggest this is due to the particular requirements of spreadsheet work in general except that Word has its own uniqueness where this subject is concerned and both of them have had such from their beginnings.
It's fairly clear that they both had routines written to enable copying and pasting in the days before widespread use of Windows. Not just that, but also, perhaps, to help their ballyhoo-ed interoperability. (Yes, "back in the day" even programs from the same company often had little or no interoperability. That's actually one of the reasons for the Windows clipboard.) And in Excel's case at least, it was also necessary because of the particular complicated world of spreadsheet needs.
Have you ever received the warning that something went wrong with a copy/paste action you took? And that you can still, even in the face of that failure, use the clipboard contents for pasting into other programs. This is why. Excel does place the copied material on the clipboard, but then interjects its own actions when you paste IN EXCEL from that clipboard material. Those actions failed therefore the message, but nothing compromised the clipboard contents, hence the fact that you can still paste it normally into other programs.
Consider this example: you have a formula producing a result. You might want to copy the cell and:
- Paste it somewhere else in the spreadsheet. Excel needs to have information to allow it to paste keeping the formula and updating its formula for addressing changes. You might want formatting to follow the paste, or for the original's formatting to be lost after the paste. Excel needs to have information to support keeping formatting if that's your wish.
- Paste it somewhere else as a result, not keeping the formula. Excel needs to convert either when placing something on the clipboard to begin with, or take the formula put there by Copy and convert it to a result only in the Paste.
- You might wish to use the Copy in some other program (including a fully separate instance of Excel). The standard Paste from the clipboard approach in Windows would be to use the cell's formula's result. Or a portion of it only. Excel must provide for this possibility while providing for it to turn out you want to do 1. or 2., above, instead, or also.
- You might edit the cell and Copy from that functionality. In that case, what Excel does is very different from a "straightforward" cell Copy.
(And there could be lots of other things I've not touched upon.)
In furtherance of these needs, Excel places a value on the clipboard and uses itself to keep information for the other needs.
One thing it does not do, and never has done, is to support the numbered action set you give in your post. It flat does NOT support copying a whole cell, then using F2-Edit to paste material from that copying INTO a cell, even if replacing the entire contents of the cell. This is so even though it is abundantly clear what the user would like to do, which is somewhat unexpected as Excel is usually far too incredibly willing to guess such desires and hose you with what it ends up doing. Trés counterintuitive, one might think.
So the cumbersome workaround is not actually a workaround. It is the actual, defined mechanism to perform the action you desire.
I've used Excel since 1992 when I got a "used" copy of the 1.0 (possibly 2.0, but 1.0 sticks in my mind) version from a friend who had decided to stick with 1-2-3. We ourselves stuck with Quattro Pro for a time, but in '93/'94 we committed to changing over. This behavior with copy/paste has been the case at least since then.
(Coming up on 30 years... in several years, I'll have been using Excel, and the internet, for more than half my life... you know, if I make it several more years. Half a lifetime using a program... I guess its "weirdnesses" are actually more the real standard I've been stuck with and not really weirdnesses. Hmm...)
Added after comment:
Office programs have access to something MS calls the Office Clipboard. This is something you have to display a task pane for, or near as I can tell, Copied items do not make it onto it. So find the Home tab in the menu (oh, I must mean the menu they call the Ribbon so they can claim to be menu-less). First section is the Clipboard section: click on the little beastie in the lower right corner and the task pane comes alive.
Now when you Copy, it will go to this pane as well as be available for normal uses. The useful, I hope, to you part is that it holds the last 24 Copies and it will paste them for you if you click on them. (MS says doubleclick, but clicking once seems to work for me.) The useful thing in that is that it is not limited like normal Excel copy and paste mechanisms. No, it will in fact paste appropriately for the situation, at least as far as pasting as a whole cell or pasting INTO a cell.
So copy a whole cell, like normal, and instead of only being able to paste that entire cell somewhere, perhaps in special ways but nonetheless, as a whole cell... instead of that, it will either do that if you just select a cell and tell it to paste, but more importantly, if you Edit a cell, as you wish to, clicking the appropriate Office Clipboard item will paste the cell's value INLINE at your insertion point, OR if you Copied a cell with a formula, it will paste the formula's result INLINE at your insertion point.
Doesn't help if you Copied a cell with a formula and wanted the formula because it will paste the value, but otherwise... it seems like it would basically be what you need. After all, you have to enter Edit mode whatever you do anyway, so that's even-Steven, and you then have to tell Excel to paste somehow so that's sort of even-Steven.
(It WILL paste formulas, just you have to do it the workaround way of entering Edit mode, highlight and Copy the formula, exit, select the pasting cell, enter Edit mode, and finally, Paste the formula. So the Office Clipboard isn't of any tremendous use for that.)
My, my... some experimenting shows that if you are using it and select, then Copy, say, three cells (cells whole, not just contents), the highlight a cell and paste, it pastes in three consecutive cells as one might expect. But if you enter Edit mode in ONE cell, it will paste the three cells' contents in the single cell placing each cell's contents on a separate line in the cell. So Copy three cells and do that and you get one cell with three lines containing the three cell's contents. (And if one of them already had multiple lines, that remains so. So if one had two lines and the other two had single lines, then you get four lines pasting INTO the cell rather than pasting cells. Though the contents of the one that already had two lines will come through wrapped with doublequotes like so:
"1 2df55fh=A1" (second cell) (third cell)
Could be worth your doing some other experiments! But it seems like this basic thing, the Office Clipboard, would make it fairly easy to meet your need.
