Friday, February 25, 2011

Are you using the right program?

I was chatting with my friend, Greg, who started out as a student in a class.  He reminded me of a thing that I used to do.  Some things seem harder than they actually are.  So when I was about to teach them one of those items, I'd put the back of my hand to my forehead, and sigh, "so much work, so much work, it's going to take hours to do this".  I would then do it in about 30 seconds and have time to do what I wanted to get done.

Looking at my last post, I talked about the table column format and changing it to regular columns. As you can see from this picture that the table has multiple columns.


You could spend hours separating this into one long column, or you could do it in a few minutes.  How??

Copy the entire table to Excel.  The table format in word will copy directly over to Excel.  Each cell of the table will go into a separate cell in Excel.

I then moved the 2nd column's data to the bottom of column 1st.  Repeat as necessary.

Once you have the data all in one column and sorted the way you want, copy and paste it back into Word....but there's a trick there too.  If you just paste, you'll have it in a grid.  The secret is to paste it into Word as text only. 

Next step is to treat it like any other text you want in columns.  Select the text and choose columns and how many you want.  Voila!  You're done, and it was almost as fast as putting your hand to your head.

4 comments:

  1. One of the best reminders that you have given is that Word expects you to type all your information THEN to format. I keep trying to format first, then type. I think that the other way would be easier.

    Karen Mehl

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  2. "The secret is to paste it into Word as text only."

    (smacking head) it never occured to me to paste as text!!! Duh! How silly of me. Now I just need to remember that the next time I paste stuff from Excel to Word.

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  3. Karen, that comes from starting with Word Perfect.

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  4. Liz -- It's a big saver. Now they have being able to have it use the formatting from the source or the destination, but many times I find it easier to do text only and then format it the way I wanted.

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