Microsoft Office Application

Let me share with you a great discovery of mine today. I don’t know if you already know this, maybe. But, I have discovered something very useful with my work today, especially with tables in Microsoft Word.

Do you know  that if you want to copy the content of the table one cell at a time, there is a simple way to highlight each cell? Perhaps you know it. But, rather than highlighting each cell or double clicking it, there is a simpler and more effective way to do it. Since I am more fond of using Excel when creating tables, that’s why I just discovered this simple trick just now with my new work.

The Tips

Using the Tab Button on Keyboard

If you want to copy the content of the table to a website, let’s say you need to copy a cell at a time, instead of highlighting the content of that cell or clicking the arrow, simply press the Tab button. Pressing the Tab button, all the content is that cell will be highlighted, allowing you to copy (Ctrl + C) them without the need to hold your mouse and highlight the content. As simple as that.

This tip is especially useful if you want to copy each content of the table and paste (Ctrl + V) them in forms or tables on websites or if you want to transfer them to another file with different format.

Now, aside from that, I’ve also learned a few more things about table today. Following are some more helpful tips.

Miscellaneous Tips

Converting Text to Table in MS Word

Let’s say you have a block of text in MS Word and after typing it all, you want to put them in a table. Drawing a table would be very tedious, especially if you have data like the following:

Apples-5

Bananas-10

Mangoes-20

Oranges-20

Grapes-10

Lemon-5

Kiwi-10

Strawberry-50

So, what you gonna do? With MS Word 2007 and later, you can automatically convert that text into the table below. (Don’t actually know if this feature is present with the 2003 version since I’m using 2007.)

Resulting Table

This table was derived from highlighting the text then go to Menu >>  Insert >>Table >> Convert text to table.  You will be prompted with a dialog box for you to set your preferences.

MS Word table example

Converting Table to Text in MS Word

On the contrary, if you want to convert a table to its text form, you can simply click the table, then, go to Table Tools>>Layout>>Convert to Text.  (Table Tools won’t show up in the Menu if you don’t click the table.) You can revert the table above to its text form. So, follow the path and convert  the table to text. You will be prompted with another dialog box where you can set your preferences:

Convert table to text

Then, we will have our table in text form similar to the data above.

In the End…

Simple, right?

If you have tips, you can share it with us. We are more than willing to learn new and old tips and tricks that we haven’t known of ourselves.

Thank you for sparing time reading these simple tips for the day. We hope you learned something.  If you have, why don’t you leave a comment below.