Last week I talked about how you can create tables with no borders when you need to line up text. Another use for tables is for working with data. Behind the scenes, Word’s mail merge feature has used tables for the data for years. Newer versions tend to hide this fact, but basically, when you are merging data into a document, it’s probably coming from something in tabular format, whether it’s a spreadsheet, database, or other data file.
Sometimes you have to work with data that was not created in Word such as data from an old contact management program, for example. You probably can find some type of export that will let you get the data out into a text or comma-delimited format. The easiest way to deal with the data after you get it into Word is to turn it into a table.
So, once you have your text file exported, select all of it and paste it into a blank Word document. Once it is in Word, take a look at what you’ve got. In our contact management example, you might have lines of data that began with first name and last name like this:
John Smith
In this case, your job would be to replace the multiple spaces with tabs and then convert the whole thing into a table. So, first you want to use Find and Replace to replace spaces with tabs. So first figure out how many spaces are between each piece of data (for example, there are 5 spaces between John and Smith). Then choose Edit|Replace.
In the Find what box, type the space bar five times. In the Replace with box type ^t. Then click Replace All. Word replaces every five spaces with one tab.
Now select the all the text by pressing Ctrl+A and choose Table|Convert|Text to Table. In the dialog box, you should see that Word suggests two columns and that text should be separated at Tabs. Click OK and magically a two-column table appears ready for use in a mail merge.