Microsoft Word 2016 Tutorial - Convert Text To Table

Sometimes you may require to move text
inside a table, that you have already written, but decided later that it should
be inside the table. So, in this video, we will learn that how you can convert
that already written text, into a table without actually moving it by cut and
paste.

In this document, I have some piece of
information already written that I want to convert into a table. Before we do
this, let’s clarify some information first. The first thing you should aware of
that, how the text has been separated. Converting text to table work best if
the text has been consistently separated. To understand this, let’s first turn
on Show Hide Paragraph mark option from the Home tab.

As you can see in this document, where
I have Item Names on one side and their prices on the other, and both has been
separated using Tab key, and that Tab key is the separator in this text. As you
can see in the ruler that I have assigned a left tab to move the cursor exactly
below to 4 inch, in a single tab press. Whereas on the second page of the same
document, you can see that I have used many tabs to separate text to a specific
position on the page. So how this will affect the conversion? We will talk
about this later in this video. Let’s convert the above text first.

You can find Convert Text to Table
command under Insert tab, then in Insert drop down menu. But as you can see
that this command is currently unavailable. To convert text into table, first
you need to highlight the text that you want to convert. Now click on Insert
tab, then click Insert drop down menu, and then click Convert Text to Table.
The Convert Text to Table dialog box appear with some predefined settings.

The first thing you should note here
is the Separate Text at, where Tab is already selected, and within from the
entire selected text, Word has automatically counted that how many columns
should be used during conversion, which in our case is 2. Word check the mode
of the written text, like how many paragraph marks has been used between words,
and which paragraph mark has been used to separate text. If your text has
consistency, then Word will automatically suggest you the number of columns
required and the paragraph mark used to separate text.

On the other hand, if I do the same
for the text on the second page, then you can see that Word has automatically
grasp the correct paragraph mark, but this time it is showing a total of 7
columns required to separate the text. This is because, Word counted the
maximum and similar paragraph marks used in the selected text. So, how we can
correct this? We will come to this later, let’s first convert the previous
text.

One more thing that you can notice
while converting text to table is, number of rows, which in our case are 10.
The total selected text actually has a total of 10 lines separated by enter in
the end of each line. So, this is how Word identify your text by paragraph
marks.

The next option you have is, Auto Fit
Behavior that we have already discuss in our previous video about Creating
Tables in Word. You can either choose Fixed Column Width which is set to Auto,
so Word will automatically try to fit the text within columns, or you can go
for Auto Fit according to text, and wrap the text if that doesn’t fit within
column, or Auto Fit to Window size.

If you think that Word has by
mistakenly identify the wrong paragraph mark, then you can choose the correct
paragraph mark that you have used to separate the text, or if you have used a
custom paragraph mark like, Hyphen or Asterisk sign to separate the text, then you
can type it in the Other box.

Once you are done with the settings,
click the OK button, and there you have the entire selected text converted into
a table. You can adjust the column width if required.

Now let’s move to the second page,
where the Tab paragraph mark has been used to separate text, but the problem is
that, it has been used more than one time in a single line, so Word counted a
wrong number of columns, which we don’t want.

You can also note that, if I reduce
the column numbers, then Number of Rows are automatically increasing, and if I
go with this setting, see what happened? So the only way to overcome from this
problem is to, only use a single paragraph mark between text to separate them,
and delete the remaining from all the lines. Convert the same text to table
again, and you will see that, this time Word has correctly counted the columns.