Copy & Paste
AE Sheets provides several ways to copy and export your layer data, all accessible from the Source comp menu ( ⌄ ) in the table header. A Paste button in the "New comp" column header lets you push clipboard content back into the active version.
Copy & export actions
| Action | What it produces |
|---|---|
| Copy source layers with index | Tab-separated index + source value for each row |
| Copy all versions | Full TSV with source and all version columns |
| Export .tsv | Same as above, written to a file |
| Copy JSON | Structured JSON payload with source language, target languages, and translations - used by the Google Sheets macro |
| Paste (version table header) | Distributes clipboard lines into the active version |
Paste behaviour
Lines from your clipboard are distributed positionally into the version rows, sorted by index.
Example - source comp with four indexed layers, clipboard contains:
Nouveau projet ?
Rencontrez votre équipe.
Outro_fr-FR
Engagez maintenant
| # | Source | fr-FR result |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | New project? | Nouveau projet ? |
| 2 | Meet your team. | Rencontrez votre équipe. |
| 3 | Outro_en-GB (comp) | Outro_fr-FR selected in dropdown (if it exists in the project) |
| 4 | Hire now | Engagez maintenant |
For comp rows, the pasted value is matched against compositions in your project by exact name. If no match is found, the line is consumed and the row keeps its existing value.
Text-only mode
Enable "Only include text layers in copy, paste and import/export actions" in Settings → General to restrict all copy, export, and paste operations to text-type rows only. Comp rows are excluded in both directions.
Copy & export (text-only)
Comp rows are omitted from every output. The same four-layer example produces only three lines in clipboard / TSV / JSON:
New project?
Meet your team.
Hire now
This applies to all four copy/export actions in the table above.
Paste (text-only)
Comp rows are skipped entirely - they do not consume a clipboard line. Lines map sequentially to text rows only.
Example - clipboard contains three translated text lines:
Nouveau projet ?
Rencontrez votre équipe.
Engagez maintenant
| # | Source | fr-FR result |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | New project? | Nouveau projet ? |
| 2 | Meet your team. | Rencontrez votre équipe. |
| 3 | Outro_en-GB (comp) | (skipped - unchanged) |
| 4 | Hire now | Engagez maintenant |
This mode is ideal when working with translation tools or spreadsheets that only contain the text content and are unaware of comp rows.
Summary
| Mode | Output | Paste behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Default | All rows (text + comp names) | Lines map to all rows; comp lines matched by name |
| Text-only | Text rows only | Lines map to text rows only; comp rows skipped |