If you use tables a lot, there will be times when you need to use tabbed text instead of a table. For example, you may use a sophisticated graphing program that will not read Word documents, but it will read Tab Delimited files. In this sort of situation, you could convert your table to tabbed text, save it as a Tab Delimited file, and use it in the other application.

Luckily, it’s really easy to convert your Word table to a tabbed file. Just place your cursor in the table you want to convert, click the Table menu, choose Convert, and choose Table to Text.

Once you click that Option, you will see the conversion dialog pictured to the right. This allows you to pick what marker will separate each item of data; this may be important depending on why you’re converting your data. (For example, if your aim is to create a Comma Separated Values file, you would want to choose Comma in this dialog box.)

Once you click OK, your table will look quite different:

Although font choices will remain, borders, shading and other customizations will be lost (similar to saving a file as plain text). Your fields will be separated by the marker you chose in the Convert Table to Text dialog box.

To convert your tabbed text back to a table, select the entire group of tabbed text. Then, click the Table menu, choose Convert, and click Text to Table. You’ll see the Convert Text to Table dialog appear (a sample is pictured on the right).

This window is almost exactly the same as the window you would use to create a table from the Table menu. You can choose the number of columns that the table should have; Word will fill in the number that it thinks your table should contain, based on the tabbed data. You cannot set the number of rows; this is defined by the tabbed data.

You can also set AutoFit behaviour and the Table Style. Last but not least, choose the separator that was used in the text. (Word usually picks this up by default.) Once you click OK, your tabbed text will be turned back into a table!