How to easily spread out one column into several in Google Docs?

April 29, 2024 1:57 AM

In Google Docs, I have a list of dozens of words that runs down the page on the left-hand margin. How can I easily "spread" these words out horizontally as well, effectively making several columns of words?

So to reiterate, there is just one word per line, on the left-hand margin, all the way down for several pages. I want to easily put those words into columns with a few clicks. There are several ways to do it the hard way: delete the line breaks and tab words across each line, or make columns with a table and paste them in manually. These are doable but painstaking and time-consuming and I am lazy. Is there a quick trick to spread the words "upward" and "rightward" in to columns?

posted by zardoz to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

If I’m understanding your question correctly, you are looking to switch rows and columns aka paste transpose.
posted by oceano at 2:46 AM on April 29

Best answer: Google Docs has multicolumn layouts. Just use those (I think they're under the Format menu?)
posted by kokaku at 3:05 AM on April 29

To be really clear:

1- is the result you want an actual table (like what you get when you do Insert Table), or just words graphically displayed in columns, potentially via tabs or multicolumn view or such?

2- if your current setup looks like

word1
word2
word3
word4
word5
word6

is the result you want something like (a)

word1 word2
word3 word4
word5 word6

or (b)

word1 word4
word2 word5
word3 word6

or (c)

word1 word2 word3 word4 word5
word6

or something else?

3- does the result you want have to be in Google Docs, or would Google Sheets work too (i.e., can the result be a spreadsheet file)?
posted by trig at 3:24 AM on April 29

Response by poster: kokaku- that's it! So simple. But for some reason it's limited to three columns, but that will work.

trig- I don't need an actual table, just the list of words more economically and practically spaced on the page. So your a), b), or c) are all good. c) might be best as there could be at least five or ten(?) columns on a page, depending on how far they are spaced. The words can even be in random order.
posted by zardoz at 3:35 AM on April 29

Best answer: Okay, then multicolumn layout is probably easiest, but if you want (and don't mind if the columns aren't perfectly lined up, or if you need to do some slight manual tweaking) you could also just do a global search-replace to change your line breaks into tabs.

To do that, type a tab somewhere, select it, and copy it. Then go to Edit->"Find and replace", check the box that says "Use regular expressions", type \n in the Find field, and then - because Google is ridiculous - you have to actually paste the tab you copied earlier into the Replace field instead of typing \t or something logical like that. Then hit "Replace all" and all your newlines will now be tabs.

If you want to get everything perfectly lined up, then you need to be in Pages format (because Pageless format apparently doesn't allow tab stops...) So if necessary, hit Format->"Switch to Pages format". Then if your ruler isn't visible, do View->"Show ruler". Then right-click wherever you want on the ruler and hit "Add left tab-stop" as many times as you want, and then drag the tab stops along the ruler so that all your columns are lined up the way you want them to be.

If you don't want to go with tab stops you could also just replace the newlines with multiple tabs instead of a single one and then line things up by manually deleting or adding tabs where necessary, but that's more hacky.
posted by trig at 5:03 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]

If you don't care about the words actually being in columns but just want them together across the top, you can use TEXTJOIN.

If column A has:
APPLE
BANANA
CANTALOUPE

In cell B1, you can put =TEXTJOIN(", ", TRUE, A1:A3), and that will populate all the words into B1 and separate them by a comma and a space.
posted by Leontine at 6:06 AM on April 29

Honestly, for dozens of words, I would use ChatGPT or another language model for this provided it doesn't involve sensitive data. The free version may be able to handle it. You can also try Microsoft Copilot online in creative mode to get a more powerful model, or Claude.ai. Ask for a table and it gives you a table that you can select the text in your browser (don't use the copy button as then you'll get Markdown) and paste and match formatting (Ctrl + Shift + V in Google docs iirc).

Excel also would probably work but might be complex based on the way I'm understanding your data.
posted by lookoutbelow at 6:24 AM on April 29

Nthing that this is very easy to do in a spreadsheet, especially when you don't need to keep them in order.

make columns with a table and paste them in manually

Copy and pasting a column of words from a text file into a spreadsheet doesn't need to be one at a time. You copy them and paste them and they will now be in their own rows in the first column, as long as you did not double click in cell you are pasting them into. There might be blank lines or some odd formatting, but those are easily sorted, too. Lets say you have 144 words and can fit 24 vertically on a printed page. So you need six columns. Excel or Sheets will let you cut 24 at a time and paste them anywhere, so this would be like 5 cut/paste actions. If you have more, macros can be recorded to move the data around.
posted by soelo at 6:06 PM on April 29