From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Converting existing text to a table - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

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Converting existing text to a table

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Sometimes when you want to create a table, you already have the text, and you don't want to have to reenter that text, or even cut and paste it into a new table, so another option is to actually convert that text into a table. It'll work well if you've got consistent separators. Take a look at our document called Asparagus2 here, where we already have our ingredient list made up of quantities, and descriptions, and in between each of the numbers or quantities, and the description, whoever has entered this has hit the Tab key to do so. So the separator here is a Tab. That's good to know when we go to create a table from this text. So the first step is to select it. Let's click in the margin next to 24, click and drag all the way down to get every one of the lines, and now when we go up to the Insert tab, click the Table dropdown, you'll notice a Convert Text to Table option, which we're going to select. When we do this, we get a dialog box. You'll see the Number of columns its thinking it's going to create here is 2. The Number of rows is 7; one for each of our ingredients. Also the Fixed column width is set to Auto; you can see that here. Separate text at the Tabs. So, the Tabs are selected. If we had used commas, we could have used that, or paragraphs, which are returns, or Other, for that matter. Maybe it's dashes, for example, or stars, or whatever. If you choose Other, you can enter that character here, but we're using tabs. It's already selected. All we have to do is click OK, and look what happens. That's beautiful. Notice that the first column is set to automatically fit the content, and it's wrapping around here, and in our second column, where we have our ingredients, you can see everything fits nicely there. Now, of course, we have all of the design and layout tools available to us here on the ribbon now, so we can change the look of this, but how fast was that to create a table out of our existing text, and not have to copy, or cut and paste it into a new table we might've created? That's a nice little feature here in Word 2013 that I really like. Now it's time to spruce up our table. We'll talk about that next.

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