Convert paragraph to line-by-line table in Word

February 11, 2020 2:05 AM

Would it be possible to take a paragraph of text in word and (efficiently) put each word in a cell, but have each line of text a separate table? (No need for the words to be aligned column by column. I'm wanting to add some analysis word-by-word).
posted by Hadrian to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Maybe an Excel/Word solution. Paste your paragraph into a cell in Excel, then highlight and from the Data Menu choose Text-to-Columns, then Delimited, and choose space to separate each word.

You could repeat this process splitting on line breaks, but it's probably faster to just use copy-paste to put the cells with words into rows.

You can copy-paste this table back to word if you want to when it's done.
posted by thelastpolarbear at 2:45 AM on February 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

You can copy the para into a text editor, make line breaks after each period. Do this manually by hitting enter or return at the start of each sentence (or you’ll capture the space or spaces after the period at the start of each line. Some text editors will let you search and replace all instances of period + space (or period plus space space if that’s your jam) with a hard return.

Next, open word back up and make a 2 community N row table (where N is the number of sentences). Copy and paste the lines as a group and paste into the upper left cell of the table; each line should go into its own cell with a blank next to it.

(Working from memory sorry)
posted by tilde at 3:35 AM on February 11, 2020

Tilde's suggestion does not work. The entirety of what was copied goes into one cell.
posted by megatherium at 5:41 AM on February 11, 2020

I believe you can actually do much of what tilde suggests entirely in Word, using ‘find and replace’ with ‘special’ characters. Then go to ’insert table’ and pick ‘convert text to table’, choosing space as the character to separate by.
Now you have an insanely large table (you might need to start by maximising paper size and minimising font, so it fits) with one word in each cell and each line on its own row. I think the result is nearly what you want, but I don’t know the best way to make each row a separate table. I would probably paste the whole thing into Excel for ease of manipulation, tbh.
posted by Segundus at 5:41 AM on February 11, 2020

Unless I am missing something here, surely the simplest way is to select the line you want to be a table. Table>Convert Text to Table>Separate Text at>Click on Other >Type a space>OK

Repeat for each line
posted by TheRaven at 5:59 AM on February 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Sorry, yes, you have to select the whole column, not the first cell only in Word.

Word may support special character searching and replacement but I usually am cleaning up Word's messes using a text editor, so habit.
posted by tilde at 7:30 AM on February 11, 2020