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Sounds sort of ridiculous, doesn’t it? I’ll bet you’ve had this happen, though: you have a massive list to sort  and filter. You think, “Piece of cake.” You open Excel and paste in your list, feeling smug, only to have your ego dashed against one of those who-needed-it life lessons: the whole list settles into one cell or one column. It’s an easy fix. It looks complicated, but once you’re used to it, it takes seconds.

Paste the whole business into Word. Highlight it all, and convert table to text.

Highlight it again and convert it back to a table, only this time specify how many columns you want and and what point you want to separate the records (comma, dash, etc. Bizarrely, Word doesn’t recognize a semi-colon as a common separator even though it’s the default in Outlook. I picture forts with stockades and cannons inside the Microsoft campus. Anyway, there’s a place for “other,” so if you have semi-colons, enter them there.) Note: do it backward: choose the separator first then enter the number of columns – otherwise the number of columns will change when you  aren’t looking and you’ll think it didn’t work.

Every list is different; you may need to do a quick find and replace of excess semi-colons or spaces. Once it looks right in Word, you can paste the whole table into Excel and get the extra functionality you were hoping for in the first place. Replace your smug.

If that sounds like a foreign language, your can find a little more in-depth description on converting text to table and back again in Reversing Last Name First Lists.

Don’t see the answer to your question? Click here.

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