I have a piece of text with many lines. What's the easiest way to convert these lines into rows of a Google Docs table?
(Sure, I could create a table manually and 1-by-1 copy/paste each line into each row, but that would be a waste of time.)
The problem for a Q&A site is that "easiest" is subjective.
However I can offer one approach which is to copy the text into Sheets and copy that back into Docs.
It is quite practical for me, but might not be "easiest" for you.
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1Interesting... this is fast enough if there's no proper inbuilt way. Btw is this a proper "clean" Google docs table? Or would there be some invisible WYSIWYG metadata lurking around? – Pacerier Dec 16 '17 at 4:04
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@Pacerier It copies the formatting as well. You can use "Clear Formatting" option to fix it, but you still have to manually fix the "Cell padding" (should be 0.176 cm or 0.069 in) and "Cell vertical alignment" (should be Top) in "Table Properties". – ADTC May 24 '19 at 6:56
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I am still waiting for a built in tool, two years later. So +1 for this workaround, thank you – Qsigma Oct 23 '19 at 9:07
Incidentally, to convert a table to plain text, do pretty much the reverse of what pnuts said: copy the table or table fragment, paste without formatting to a Sheet, copy that, and paste without formatting to a Doc.
For some reason if you simply copy/paste from a Doc to a Doc, every cell is pasted on its own line (which in my mind is a bug, but whatever). But if you copy/paste from a Sheet to a Doc, the cells are tab-separated. Woo-hoo!
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1Pasting without formatting to a doc just puts everything into one cell, somehow. – riv Jun 3 '19 at 22:27
You can try BulletsToTable.com which will convert your list to a table.
Bonus: It works for heirarchical lists as well, so something like:
- Item 1
- Sub-item 1
- Sub-sub-item 1
- Sub-sub-item 2
- Sub-item 2
- Sub-sub-item 3
will become
