Tip: Use Excel or Open Office and Cut & Paste to Create a Multi-Column Question or Answer

Question

Do you ever want to create a question or an answer to a question where you have two or more columns that line up perfectly? For example:

ablandar	to soften, mellow - (make it more bland)
abundar	to abound - verb = to be abundant
agrandar	to enlarge - make it grand
ahondar	to deepen, explore - Honda explored the U.S. market before entering
andar	to walk - I keep walking AND walking AND walking...

.......................................

The key to doing this is to use the table format as explained here: Spanishdict Formatting Tricks

It is really easy to do this with Excel or OpenOffice Calc and then just cut and paste a selection into the Spanishdict Question or Answer box.

If you want to create multiple columns without a header, as was done above you just do the following:

||| In your first line, just put 3 or more consecutive "pipe marks" (one more pipe than you have columns)

|-|-| In your second line put pipe-dash-pipe-dash-pipe (again with one more pipe than you want to have columns)

In the following line put a formula such as ="|"&A1;&"|"&B1;&"|"

This assumes that the contents of your first column, first row info is in A1 and your second column first row info is in A2. This put the contents of both columns into one cell in Excel, with pipe marks before, between and after the column contents.

Subsequent rows in Excel use the same formula but increment to A2, B2, etc.

One final thing: to create a some space between your columns, for one cell only in Excel you need to add the formula &REPT;(CHAR(160);10)&. In this case 10 spaces were put between the two columns. If you don't do this your longest entry in column 1 will determine where column 2 will be placed, without any spaces between the entry in column 1 and column two for that row. If you have more than two columns you need to repeat this process.

That's it!

Answer 1

Bumping this up. Thanks Ken!