MS Word 2003 - Totally OT ...

Oct 31, 2015 4 Replies

Machine running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. MS Office with Word 2003 (I'm pretty sure). Very specific question - you will either know the answer or not. I'm not looking to mess about trying things. Just seeing if anybody knows this.



Some months back, I started to make a document where I could write in values - that's with a pen on a printed-out sheet. It started out as a plain text document, but then as it got some way along, I made the places where I wanted to write stuff in into crude 'boxes' by using underscore , lots of tabs, and that vertical line above the "\" at the left side of the keyboard - 'pipe' is it called ?? Not a very elegant way of doing it, I know, but I was already too far in time-wise when I realised that I should have constructed a table, and it didn't matter what it looked like, as it was just for me.



At some point, I had copied a line of these boxes, and was merrily pasting in copies down the page. All of a sudden, a question box popped up on the screen that said something like "Are you trying to create a table ?" That might not have been exactly it, but along those lines. I was a bit taken aback by this 'intelligent' intervention on the part of Word, and without looking much closer, I just clicked "YES". It wasn't going to do much harm as I had only just saved a copy. Long and short of it - Bam! It converted the whole page into a beautifully tabulated sheet with neat boxes and rows and columns made out of uninterrupted lines. It was a better result than I think I could have created had I have gone straight for a table.



So, the question is, does anyone know (for certain) how this happened, or how I invoke this feature again, as I have another similarly-made document now that I would dearly love Word to do the same to ...



I've looked on the 'net at tutorials, forums, question boards, you name it. But no reference to this one click solution. Lots of stuff about converting text to tables and all sorts of multi-stage conversion processes, but nothing as simple as answering "YES" to a question automatically posed by Word itself. I know there's lots of computah boffs on here much cleverer at it than me, so anyone know what I'm talking about ?



Arfa



In message , Arfa Daily writes

Table/Convert/Text to table? I did select sample text first, but maybe it works without that.

I'm guessing that you had "help" enabled and Word itself guessed what you wanted to do.

Otherwise as the other poster said, select all and convert text to table. Works best if you already used tabs or commas as delineating characters.

On 31 Oct 2015, "Arfa Daily" grunted:

Sounds like the ghastly Office Assistant to me (that Microsoft dumped after Office 2003 - was there a dancing paper clip on screen too?). I remember that it could be switched off - which was the first thing I ever did when starting to use an early copy of Office! - but assuming yours is switched on, that doesn't explain why it doesn't replicate the behaviour now. Dunno.

If all your tables are put together using 'pipe' symbols as separators, doesn't the 'Convert text to table' tool work for you, if you define the separators accordingly within the tool? Maybe try converting the 'pipes' to tabs (^t) first?

On the menu bar across the top of the WORD page, you should have several options: File Edit View Insert Format Tools Table Window Help

Click on Table and follow the options.

If you haven't got Table displayed on the Menu bar, you can edit what you do have using Tools > customise.

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