I made some copy and paste interface between QTableWidget and Excel sheet (only text). The clipboard interface in PyQt4 can be acquired by clip = QtGui.QApplication.clipboard() clip.setText("hoge") text = clip.text() In QTableWidget, text in a cell can be acquired by item(r,c).text() this returns Qstring and has to be converted to str if you want. A text can be set to a cell by setItem(row, column