[data reporting]

I am trying to remove all the tabs from a word document. My problem is I
need to export the word document to a text file. However, when I export the
word document to a text file, the tabs all become blank spaces. My text
document needs to have certain data at specific locations, and these blank
spaces are offsetting my data. In the example below, I need both fields to
use 8 spaces, so that the lower case alpha characters start at column 9. I
cannot remove all blank spaces, because I sometimes there will be blank fill.
The alpha characters need to start at column 9 regardless if the size of the
numeric field. In both of the lines below, the alpha characters start at
column 9 (they just do not look that way).
12345 abc
12345678xyz