How to Use Word to Create Your Excel Table
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. It’s an easy fix.
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.) 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.
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Reversing Last Name First Lists
Reversing Name Order in Mail Merge
