Tablora · Library
Inspect a tab-separated spreadsheet paste
Cells copied from a spreadsheet arrive separated by tabs. Choose the Tab delimiter so values with spaces, like Paper sheets, stay in one cell.
What a spreadsheet paste really contains
When you copy a range of cells from Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets and paste it as text, each cell is separated by a tab character and each row ends with a line break. On screen the tabs look like spaces, which tempts people to treat any run of whitespace as a column boundary. That splits every description with a space in it, so Paper sheets becomes two cells and the row is suddenly one column too wide.
The inspector reads the actual tab character when you choose Tab as the Delimiter, so spaces inside a cell stay where they are.
Inspecting the A1 and Paper sheets rows
The page example is a header code and description, separated by a tab, and a record A1 and Paper sheets, also separated by a tab. With Tab as the Delimiter, the inspector reports 2 rows and 2 columns. Row 2, column 2 reads Paper sheets, with its internal space intact.
If the paste came through an editor that replaced tabs with spaces, the tab is gone and no delimiter setting can restore it. Copy again from the spreadsheet directly.
Working with a pasted range
- Paste the range into Table text without editing it.
- Choose Tab as the Delimiter, or leave Detect delimiter selected and check the result.
- Press Calculate and compare Columns with the number of columns you copied.
- Check Rows with a different width; a non-zero value often means a cell in the range contained a line break or a tab of its own.
- Use the preview to decide what to do next: Download (CSV), a text-safe XLSX, or the numeric normalizer for an amount column.
Pasting from the Tablora app
The Tablora app's Copy option writes the current table to the clipboard in this same tab-separated form, so it can be pasted straight into a spreadsheet. To keep the paste in shape, the app replaces any tab or line break inside a cell with a space. That means a pasted table always has one line per row, but a multi-line note arrives as a single line.
If you paste the copied table here with Tab as the Delimiter, you can check its width before it goes anywhere else. When the original line breaks matter, export CSV or XLSX from the app instead of copying.
Tabs inside values
A tab inside a value is rare, but when it happens in a paste without quotes, it creates an extra column for that row. Fix it in the source or in a copy, then calculate again.
Original synthetic example
- Input
- code description A1 Paper sheets
- Delimiter
- TAB
- Expected records
- 2
- Columns in the first record
- 2
- Cell to inspect
- Row 2, column 2: Paper sheets