Converting Text To a Table In MS Word

A short (3:35) tutorial on how to convert text to a table.

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Closed Caption:

hello this is David Miller with a
quality educational video group in this
short tutorial I'm going to show you how
to convert some text into a table tables
are much easier to use for aligning and
formatting let's take a look at what
we've got here on the screen as you can
see this looks like a fairly well lined
up table but if you look right in here
you'll notice that these columns are not
exactly lined up these columns are not
exactly lined up and if you wanted to
put in any lines to draw the distinction
between the columns and the Rose you'd
be out of luck and the reason for that
let me go right up here to the top and
click on this little paragraph button
marker click and you'll see this
displays the characters that are
normally not visible these dots indicate
spaces the paragraph symbol indicates a
carriage return little arrows indicate
tab markers so you can see we do not
have a table here what we have is a
series of texts the first thing we're
going to need to do is to convert all of
the spaces to tab characters notice
right here in the first two lines we
have a tab character and then a space or
tab character in a series of spaces
let's delete all of the multiple spaces
and replace them with tab characters the
easiest way to do that click at the
beginning hit shift control right arrow
that highlights all of the spaces and
press the tab key i'm going to hit the
right arrow number of time shift control
right arrow and tab
alright I'm going to do that for all of
the rest of the spaces at the end of the
line i'm going to delete any extraneous
spaces and at the end of the next line
i'm going to delete the extra tab
characters you will notice as we do this
that the characters do not line up right
away but that's okay once we change them
to a table they will line up properly
ok you can see we have now completed the
table itself we notice the first line of
the data has multiple line spacing I'm
going to fix that by highlighting the
entire table and pressing ctrl shift and
for normal text we have now converted
the entire text element to normal text
and now it's time to convert this to a
table this is simple enough to do come
up to the top line menu where it says
table convert text to table we have
replaced the spaces with tabs we wanted
to have how many columns drag that out
of the way
1234567 columns ok 2 3 4 5 6 7 we wanted
automatic column with we want to
separate the text at tab characters and
click ok we have automatic within their
we have table is automatically drawn
lines and essentially that's the way to
convert text to a table