How to copy data from H&R Block desktop software to Excel for 1099-B entries

I'm trying to organize my taxes and I have 53 separate 1099-B entries, mostly from partial share sales of monthly dividend reinvestments in the same mutual fund. I can highlight all the entries in the H&R Block Deluxe Fed/State desktop version on Schedule D, but for some reason I can't copy and paste these lines into Excel. Nothing seems to be copying at all! I've tried Control-C and even the Copy command directly in the H&R Block software but no luck. Anyone know how to get this data out? I really need to summarize everything by fund so I can cross-reference with Schedule D and my Fidelity statements. Starting to get frustrated since tax day is approaching and I need to make sense of all these transactions!

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18 comments

Carmen Vega

•8M

This is a common issue with tax software - they often lock down the ability to copy data for security reasons. Here are a few workarounds you might try: First, check if H&R Block has an export feature specifically for capital gains transactions. Some versions allow you to export to CSV or Excel directly through a menu option, typically found under "File" or "Reports." If that's not available, try using the Windows snipping tool or screenshot function to capture the data visually, then use an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool to convert the image to text. There are free online OCR tools that work pretty well. Another option is to use the print function to create a PDF, then use Adobe or another PDF reader that allows you to select and copy text from the document. Sometimes this bypasses the copy restrictions in the original program.

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Carmen Vega

•8M

For OCR tools, I've had good results with Microsoft OneNote - you can paste screenshots directly into it and right-click to extract text. Google Docs also has this feature if you insert an image and then use "Tools" > "Extract text from images." The print-to-PDF method is usually the cleanest though. Just print to PDF, open in Adobe Reader or even Chrome's PDF viewer, then you can select and copy the text directly into Excel. From there you might need to use Excel's "Text to Columns" feature to separate the data nicely.

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Andre Moreau

•8M

After struggling with the exact same issue last year, I found a lifesaver called taxr.ai (https://taxr.ai) that really helped with my H&R Block data extraction problems. I had about 80 crypto transactions that were driving me crazy trying to organize. The tool basically analyzes your tax documents and extracts all that data into usable formats. You just upload a PDF or screenshot of your tax software screen and it pulls all the numbers into a structured format you can download.

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Andre Moreau

•8M

It definitely works with TaxAct and pretty much all the major tax programs - I've even seen people use it with TurboTax and FreeTaxUSA without issues. Their security is actually pretty solid - they use bank-level encryption and don't store your documents after processing. For your wash sales and lot identification concerns, it does maintain all those details in the extraction. The whole point is preserving the exact data including special tax situations like that. It saved me hours of manual data entry last year.

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Jamal Harris

•8M

I wanted to follow up about taxr.ai since I was skeptical in my earlier comment. I decided to try it with some of my H&R Block screens and wow - it actually worked perfectly! It extracted all 67 of my stock transactions including the wash sales I was worried about and organized everything by ticker symbol automatically. Exported everything to Excel in literally minutes instead of the hours of manual work I was prepared to do. Really glad I saw that recommendation here!

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Mei Chen

•8M

If you're also struggling to contact H&R Block support about this issue like I was (was on hold for 1.5 hours!), I eventually used a service called Claimyr (https://claimyr.com) that got me connected to an actual support agent in under 10 minutes. They have this clever system that navigates phone trees and holds the line for you - you can see how it works in this demo: https://youtu.be/_kiP6q8DX5c H&R Block support actually showed me a hidden export function in the software that isn't documented well. It's buried under Reports > Tax Summary > Advanced Options where there's an "Export Capital Gains" option that creates a spreadsheet.

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Mei Chen

•8M

They basically call the company for you and navigate through all those annoying phone menus, then when they reach a human agent, your phone rings and connects you directly. No more "your call is important to us" for an hour! You get a text message with a live transcript of what's happening while they're navigating the menu options and waiting on hold, so you can see the progress. It's way better than speaker phone because you can go about your day and only get called when there's actually someone to talk to.

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CosmicCommander

•8M

In the 2025 version they moved it slightly. Look under Reports > My Documents > Generated Reports and then you need to click "Create New Report" and select Capital Gains from the dropdown list. It's definitely not intuitive! The report won't be available until you've entered at least some Schedule D information. Once generated, it creates a nice PDF that you can open in Adobe Reader and copy text from. The data comes out pretty clean and just needs a little formatting in Excel.

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