Get "This site requires JavaScript to be enabled" when pasting to Excel

[scottangehr]

Good day team

I have end users that are copying the journal field of work notes or additional comments from IE and pasting them to Excel. They are getting a "This site requires JavaScript to be enabled" error.  I was able to replicate this action.

Any thoughts of a workaround?

Thanks

Scott

[Allen Andreas · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I was able to replicate your issue.

I was able to get around this by clicking the down arrow on the "Paste" button within Excel, and then choose text as the special paste type:

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[scottangehr]

You can also double click into the field and paste it, but we're looking for a solution for a simple copy/paste function as one would expect.

[Allen Andreas]

Well...it's because when you're copying from ServiceNow from the activity log, you are grabbing HTML as well due to how IE is displaying it and interprets it.

If you copy from a normal field in IE, this doesn't occur. Or if you copy from the activity log in Chrome...this doesn't happen...

So you have:

1) Browser interpreting that area as HTML

2) Excel is processing it as HTML

Neither are something we can change in ServiceNow to alter that behavior and I have no clue what the use case is for why they're copying that from the activity log, etc. But you'd have to develop something where they can get all of that information from another type of field then if they must use IE and they must copy the information from a records activity log. I mean you know what they're doing and why they're doing it. So...given the information I've shared here...you'd need to develop it.

 If you'd like to share more like...why they are doing this to begin with, we can help provide a possible solution.

For example..they are copying additional comments from once a record is closed for 'x' reason. Ok...so you can provide a dump of all the additional comments in an Excel document for them and schedule that to be emailed daily...

Like I said, we don't have much more information to help provide a solution.

[scottangehr]

I wish I knew why the end users do what they do - LOL

I knew this was an issue with IE and I've expressed them to not use it. I don't feel there is a need to develop anything to solve for this. There are workarounds like you stated that they will need to adapt to.

Thank you for your insight!

Scott