How to turn tab-separated text into a table

A single command does it in Write by Zaweba: select the lines and choose Convert text to table. Each line becomes a row and each tab, or each comma if you choose commas, starts a new column. You get a real table that you can format, sort and add to, instead of a list held together by tab stops.

Where this kind of text comes from

Tab separated text turns up all the time. Copy a block of cells out of a spreadsheet and paste it as plain text, and you get lines with tabs between the values. Lists exported from older programs, contact lists, results from a website and data sent in the body of an email often look the same. Commas do the same job in CSV data.

On the page, this kind of text rarely lines up. Values of different lengths push the columns out of step, and changing one entry can knock the rest of the line out of place. A table fixes that for good.

Converting step by step

Paste or type the text so each record is on its own line, with a tab between each value. Select all the lines. Choose Convert text to table and pick tabs as the separator, or commas if that is what the text uses. Write builds the table with one row per line and one column per value.

Check the result. If a row has more or fewer columns than the others, the text had an extra or missing tab on that line. Fix it in the table, or undo, fix the text and convert again.

Making the new table useful

Once it is a table, the rest of Write's table tools are available. Make the first row a header and turn on repeating header rows if the table runs over a page. Set column widths so long values have room. Add borders, all, outside, inside or none, and shade the header row to make it stand out.

Table, then Sort will put the rows in order by any column, as text, numbers, pound amounts or dates, with the header kept at the top. That is often the reason for converting in the first place: a pasted list arrives in random order and needs to be alphabetical before it goes into a report.

Going the other way

Sometimes you need the reverse. A system might want plain text with tabs between values, or you may want to paste a table's contents into an email. Convert table to text turns each row back into a line with tabs between the values, ready to copy.

When a mail merge is the real goal

If the list is names and addresses for letters, a table in a document is not the best home for it. Write's mail merge from a CSV file takes an export from Excel or Google Sheets, with commas, semicolons or tabs, and makes one letter per row. Keep the data in the spreadsheet and merge from there.

For everything else, from a price list to a set of results, converting text to a table is one of the small tools in Write by Zaweba that saves a surprising amount of fiddling with tab stops.