How can I stop Word duplicating all the words when I convert text to a table?

Question

In Microsoft Word I have a list of words, one per line, many pages, like below:

xxxx
yyyy
zzzz
aaaa
bbbb

When I copy these lines and paste them into a 1x6 table it becomes like:

xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx
yyyy yyyy yyyy yyyy yyyy yyyy
zzzz zzzz zzzz zzzz zzzz zzzz
...
...

What should I do to avoid having all these duplicates?

Answer 1

My first thought is the "new lines" aren't actually new paragraphs, they are only line breaks. In this case if you copy all of the text and paste it over the whole table, all lines will be duplicated for each cell which I think is what you are finding.

You can verify this by turning on Show Formatting Marks. If this is the case, the solution would be to convert all line breaks into paragraph breaks.

Answer 2

In my view you can try to do following things which may solve the purpose

Follow the steps

A. Delete spaces line breakor paragraph break between text I should look like bring it in one line

xxxx yyyy zzzz aaaa bbbb

You can do with manually deleting and if list list is long then by find and replace

1. Open the Word document that you want to work on

2. .Press CTRL + H to bring up the Find and Replace box.

3. In the “Find what” box type ^l [this upward arrow character is called caret and is usually available on a number key and l is for line break)

4. In “Replace with” box type a ^p

B. Then press enter after each word ie After xxxx press enter this will create paragraph break xxxx yyyy zzzz aaaa bbbb

Then after yyyy press enter and so on After xxxx press enter this will create paragraph break xxxx yyyy zzzz aaaa bbbb

And make it look like

xxxx yyyy zzzz aaaa bbbb

C. Then try to copy paste in table

D. If still its repeating then use convert text to table see link with pictures how and where to

Convert text to a table or a table to text - Office Support