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.