Suppose you realize that the table you painstakingly created and completed with details really is unnecessary and your information would be better in simple paragraph format. You could take the time to copy and past the information outside of the table but that is unnecessary if you use Word table conversion feature.

Lets try a simple practice set. Open a word document and replicate the table shown below:

Place your insertion point somewhere within the table. Select Table | Convert| Table to Text

The table to text dialog box will be displayed. The table to text dialog box provides for a simple conversion to text.

Typical of the MS Office program, the dialog box will guess which indicator is appropriate to use in making the conversion. You can choose to separate the text by paragraphs, commas, tabs or other. Make sure you look at your data to determine whether Word's default suggestion makes sense for your data. In our example, Word suggests to separate by tabs as it interprets the table row indicators as a tab. After choosing how to separate the text, click on OK. Your table will not be displayed as text outside of a table with each row of the table in the table in a separate line/paragraph.

Let's try a second example:



This table is a little bit different then the 1st example because it has only one column. Each of the cells contain several lines of text.

In this example the Table to Text dialog box chooses paragraph marks as the appropriate delimiter for the conversion. When you accept Word's suggestion and click on OK, the questions in each of the table cells appropriately convert to separate text paragraphs.

Take the time to experiment with different types of tables.