I'm guessing the original document was produced with a monospaced font and
spaces. To get anywhere with that, you're going to have to replace each run
of spaces with a single tab character, making sure that each line/paragraph
has the same number of tab characters (columns). You can then use Table |
Convert | Text to Table to create a table from the tabbed text.
To replace spaces with tabs, you can try searching for ^w and replacing with
^t. If that totally messes things up, then Undo and start over with
wildcards. You'll need to use this search term:
space{2,}
where space represents a press of the spacebar. This will find instances
of two or more spaces, which can be replaced by a tab; if you have only a
single space between the £ s d amounts, you'll need to take care of those
manually, that is, by searching for a single space and replacing only as
needed.
Once you've got your table created, you'll find decimal tab stops very
helpful for aligning figures.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org
"dc1606" wrote in message
...
I am currently editing some 17th century inventories e.g.
one chair, one table xs viiid
corn in the ground ii£ vis viiid
0r £ s d
one chair, one table 0 10 08
corn 2 13 04
How can I line up the £ s d underneath one another in straight columns. Is
it possible to insert a table retrospectively? - the original transcriber
used an Amstrad and locoscript which has been converted but I cannot work
out
how to line up the columns!