Copying to Microsoft Excel with specs of text

When I copy text from another program to Excel, it does not preserve the properties of the text, such as being bold or italic. It pastes it as a plain text. Is there any way to save the text to excel with these features, whether bold or italic?

It could be a limitation imposed by the website. Try creating formatted text in MS Word, then copy that into Excel, and see what happens.

I don't have MS Office, but I managed to reproduce results using LibreOffice Writer and Calc.

If I copied text from the Longman website, I found the text formatting was not preserved (but hyperlinks were preserved). I then created a multi-coloured text in LibreOffice Writer, and copied that into Calc, and I found the formatting was preserved.