Pasting a Table From Word to Excel

I have two problems when I paste a table in Word to Excel.

The first problem is that if the table cell in word is longer than 256 characters it is truncated in Excel.

The second problem is if the table cell in word contains carriage returns then Excel breaks the Word Table Cell into multiple Excel cells.

Basically if I have a two column by two row table in Word I would like that to end up as 4 cells (2x2) in Excel. And the pasted text should correspond to all the characters in word (ie. if I put 500 words into a word table cell I want to see all the words in Excel).

I found a solution to the second part of the problem. To get the word cells and the excel word cells to match. You do a search and replace in the Word table as follows:

replace ^P with $$$
replace ^l with $$$$


Then when you paste it to excel you can replace $$$ with ^p and $$$$ with ^l.

I found this on some forum, I forget where, but it works.