Tab Delimited Text Copy Paste To Excel

Question

I'm using C# Stringbuilder to create a block of text that is properly tab-delimited (using new lines, "t," etc.) and displaying it within a tag in my web application. All of the text pastes into the first column of the spreadsheet when I copy and paste this into Excel.

The data pastes cleanly into individual cells when I copy the block's outerHTML (in Chrome) or copy/paste it into Notepad++ and THEN paste to Excel, which is the intended result of this effort. Could someone please explain how I may copy the text from my program and paste it into Excel so that it pastes into individual cells and maintains the tab-delimited format?

Answer 1

By switching the element my text was written to from a div to a textarea, I was able to paste it to Excel while maintaining the formatting. When copied and pasted from a textarea to an Excel spreadsheet with tab delimiters, the data retains its tabular format. I want to thank everyone for their assistance.