Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Question About MS Word Lists & Tables

(1/3) > >>

J-Mac:
Here's hoping that we have a Word expert here at DC. Or at least more expert than I!

Is there any way to get a list into a table in Word? I have Office 2003 on my desktop and Office 2007 on my notebook, so replies regarding either are fine with me. I want to know how I can copy a list - of sentences, of phrases, of words; whatever the case, but a text-based list - and either paste that list directly into a table, or paste the list onto a new page and then somehow format the list so that it becomes a table. Just a simple table; it can be one column wide or more, and as many rows as the list is long. BTW, if there is a way to do this in OneNote 2007 that would be just as welcome!

This is not for a specific project, but for any old time. There are so many times that I copy a list from a web page or from another application and I want to put the contents into a table. And right now the only way I know to do that is to paste the list into OneNote or Word, create a table, and then move each single, stinking, rotten word or line into its own cell. Sometimes I highlight and then drag-and-drop each piece of text, and other times I copy and paste them. And it is maddeningly slow, time consuming! Occasionally pasting the entire list into a table column works, but most of the time the entire list squashes into one cell instead of filling the column. Blah! I keep thinking that there must be a way to do this; I can't believe that everyone goes through this terribly slow process of cut/paste, cut/paste over and over again like me. I would guess that a macro could be recorded or written to do this but my own attempts at it have failed.

So if anyone knows how to get a list into a table quickly and easily, please do tell!

Thanks!

Jim

katykaty:
You're reliant on the consistency of the original list, but if you're feeling lucky:

Paste it into a blank document, select it, then Table, Convert, Text To Table.

If it's consistently formatted Word should guess the layout and therefore the number of rows and columns. If not you can try to force it yourself but you'd need to be lucky.

cranioscopical:
...or,

just paste in your text, select what you pasted and choose Table/Autoformat (2003)

David1904:
Depending on how long the list is it may be worth a bit of quick massaging with Search and Replace to insert some characters to use as delimiters to help the program convert to a table with less errors.
If you have excel as well, it may be worth pasting into that and then using convert to columns where you can use either fixed length fields or delimiters. Again, you can do this in 2 or 3 stages so as to isolate one column by delimiters and then the remainder split by field length etc.
It all depends on how many items there are in the list how much trouble you can take massaging before it becomes just as quick to enter it bit by bit

AndyM:
What happens when you copy the list from wherever and then just paste it into a blank Word document?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page