Forcing text to align with specific column in Excel?

Discussion in 'Mac Basics and Help' started by jent, Apr 18, 2012.

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  1. jent, Apr 18, 2012
    Last edited: Apr 18, 2012

    jent macrumors 6502a

    jent

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    #1
    I have Excel 2011 for Mac and pasted a text document I typed out in TextEdit. In TextEdit I hit tab enough times so that the second "column" aligned despite varying lengths in email addresses.

    When I pasted this text into Excel, the second "column" ends up being spread over several columns. I was wondering if there's an easy way to force all of these into the B column. Thanks!

    I'm including screenshots of the text in TextEdit and Excel. I whited out the email addresses on the left side of each document.
     

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  2. snberk103, Apr 18, 2012

    snberk103 macrumors 603

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    #2
    I'm not an Excel user, but it should be enough like Numbers in this case.

    It's the tabs you inserted, imo, that are causing the problems. Strip them out in the text document and then try it again. I'm thinking the tabs are a signal to Excel to go to the next cell for the next entry.

    Once the tabs are stripped there should be a way to paste down into a column. Or you can start with a single column spreadsheet to paste into that, and then add the columns you need.
     
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  3. samh, Apr 18, 2012

    samh macrumors 6502

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    #3
    Exactly. Just one one tab after the email address and they will all end up in column B.
     
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  4. miles01110, Apr 18, 2012

    miles01110 macrumors Core

    miles01110

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    #4
    You could probably use the concatenate function if all of the cells are the same size (if you have merged cells I don't think it will work) which should be the case if you just copy/pasted the text into the worksheet. Excel doesn't merge cells by default.
     
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