Routinely pasting multiple lines of text into a 3x13 table in Libreoffice Writer. How to fill the whole table automatically, not manually separately pasting each column or row?

[Copypasteman]

Maybe there is a super simple solution… but I’m not aware of it. Any hints appreciated.

I will be routinely pasting multiple lines of text into a 3x13 table in Libreoffice Writer. The page looks like 39 same sized cards or labels, and can be printed out. All the “cells” are equal fixed size. The lines of text to be pasted are all of different length and content, but each is no longer than about 130 characters.

When I paste the text, in the current situation each line of text goes automatically into its separate “cell” in the column, from top to bottom. After the bottom “cell” in that column is full, Writer automatically adds a new line to the table and pastes the next line there, then again adds a new line and so on.

This results in me having one tall column full of text, but the other two columns stay empty. I want all the lines I am pasting to go into each cell in the table smoothly and fill the whole page, in a way I don’t have to do any manual tweaks afterwards.

Question:
How to stop Writer from automatically adding a new line to the bottom of the table, and instead after the lowest “cell” in the column is full, paste automatically the next line into the top “cell” of the neighboring column to the right? And when that column is full, then again to the next column to the right until the page is full?

If there is a solution that doesn’t use tables, that’s great too! I’d like to have the end result be a 3x13 matrix on each page, where I can automatically paste text and then print out…

Thanks a lot!

[Lupp]

First of all you need to make the proper distinction between Line, Paragraph, and Table Row.

Assuming the “lines” from your question first are text paragraphs, the “lines” created against your intentions are table rows, and the 39 paragraphs you want to get into the table (or matrix-like arrangement) start on a new page below the one with the table:

You will not just have typed the text paragraphs, otherwise you would have entered them simply into the target cells of your table. Where from and in what way did you get the text into your Writer document?

Wanting to get anything into a matrix-like arrangement for printing, you need to cope with the paper size and the page margins. How do you handle this? What are your needs insofar?

Without knowing your answers I cannot suggest a reasonable solution.