OneNote Tip: Making tables from pasted text

I hit this situation last week and I am not sure if everyone knows this tip for making tables from pasted text. Here's what happened.

I had a database that I queried for some data and got 4 results. I copied the results list from the database UI and pasted to OneNote. At this point, OneNote has no clue what to do with any of the data Windows put on the clipboard, so it just copied the Plain Text to OneNote.

That's kind of a long winded way to say I wound up with this after the paste:

Ant        A small bug

Bat        a flying mammal

Capybara        best animal in the world

While the columns sort of line up, I really wanted the data in OneNote formatted better. So what you can do is put your cursor right at the end of the "t" in Ant and press TAB. When you do, we create a table for that row:

image

Bat        a flying mammal

Capybara        best animal in the world

Then do that again for the Bat and Capybara:

image

And I get my nicely formatted table. Remember, I can even hide the table borders(right click in the table \ Choose Table | Hide Borders) if I do not want them and get this:

clip_image001

I hope this helps if you want to quickly convert some roughly formatted text into a table. (Bonus question from the tester in me:) Oh, and feel free to test a bit with this - can you tell what happens if you select the letter "t" from ant and then press tab before you make the table?

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John