Return to Revisions

I’ve been advising people to post their spreadsheet data as columnar text, as was done here, here, and other places.  This is not very hard to generate.  For example, if you have these data:

and you copy and paste as text, you get TSV data:

CompanyTabPersonTabNumber
ACMETabL. FoggTab17
Sirius Cybernetics CorporationTabZaphod BeeblebroxTab42

If you have Unix/Linux (or even Cygwin), you can get from that to the desired columnar form with the command column -t -s$'\t' -o' '; as in:

$ cat data
Company Person  Number
ACME    L. Fogg 17
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation  Zaphod Beeblebrox       42

$ column -t -s$'\t' -o'    ' data
Company                           Person               Number
ACME                              L. Fogg              17
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation    Zaphod Beeblebrox    42

And of course you can reverse the process by copying the above into Excel and using “Text to Columns”.