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Create A Table Export To Excel Work With Paragraphs  

Work With Paragraphs
Paragraphs in any word processing program are very specific:
They are all of the text that starts after one ENTER KEY was hit, through and including the ENTER KEY that was hit directly after them.

For example, the following is a paragraph:
Declaration of Independence
So is the following:
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
The first paragraph of The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry, is a paragraph. If you type that in Word, the only time that you should hit Enter is when you reach the actual end of the paragraph. Word will make the paragraph fit properly within the margins that have been set.
Looking at the Word window, note the Ruler Bar above the workspace. The image above this paragraph shows the top of the Word window. Note the Ruler Bar directly above the paper. The Ruler Bar shows inches and defines the width of the paper. At the far left of the Ruler Bar is an odd-looking thing. It's actually pretty important.
That thing is really three things, and here's what they are for: The triangle on the top, facing down, is for the First Line Indent. This means that wherever that notch is, the first line of the paragraph will be aligned with it. Below that is another triangle facing up. That is the left edge of the paragraph. If the two are in line with each other, the paragraph will not be indented.

But...
To indent any paragraph or even an entire document, point the cursor to the top triangle, the First Line Indent, and drag to the position that you want the indent to be. Try it. It takes a bit of practice because the triangles are small.

But...
No more hitting the Space Bar or the Tab Key to indent a paragraph!
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Create A Table
  1. From the Menu - Click Table
  2. When the drop-down menu appears, Click Insert
  3. Click Table
    • A Dialog Boxis displayed. Select the number of columns (across) and the number of rows (down).
    • Click OK
  4. The table is displayed in your document.
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Export Data To Excel
We often use Word to create tables of information such as names and addresses, or part numbers, descriptions and prices.
It's fine at first, but becomes unwieldy as we gather more and more information. Excel is far better.
We want to migrate this Word table into an Excel worksheet.

Launch Excel.
In Word, select the table. Click Copy or hit Ctrl C.
Go to the Excel window, Click Paste or hit Ctrl V.
For the most part, Excel does a great job of accepting the Word table and migrating not only the cell contents, but formatting them properly as well.

On the other hand, sometimes it doesn't. In that case, use the Export option in Word.
In order to smoothly export data from the table, the table must be converted to text.
Again for smoothness, it's important to remove all of the extraneous paragraph marks from within the table, so we'll do that first. Select the entire table.
Click Table, Convert, Table to Text. You will be asked for a delimiter - I use the Tab character as much as possible.
Now you have your data very neatly organized with Tab characters separating the elements.
Save this as a .txt file.
Launch Excel. Open the file that you just saved, and there is your data!
Easier than it seems.
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