Align Text into Columns

Make CSV, tab-separated or pipe-separated data readable at a glance by padding every column to the width of its longest cell. Paste rows copied from a spreadsheet, a CSV file or a log, and get neatly aligned plain-text columns for a README, a code comment, an email or a terminal, or a ready-to-paste Markdown table. Numbers can be right-aligned automatically, and the reverse mode turns aligned columns back into CSV.

How to use this tool

1. Paste the rows, one per line.
2. Pick the separator, or let the tool detect tabs, pipes, commas or semicolons.
3. Choose aligned columns or a Markdown table, the column alignment and the gap between columns.
4. Copy the result; use “Reverse” to turn aligned text back into CSV or TSV.

Formula

Column width = widest cell in that column · each cell is padded with spaces to its column width

Cell widths are monospace columns using Unicode East Asian Width, so Korean, Chinese, Japanese and emoji count as two. CSV parsing follows the usual quoting rules: a cell in double quotes may contain the separator, and "" stands for a quote; a quoted cell cannot run over a line break, because each line is one row. In automatic alignment, a column whose cells (below the header) are all numbers, money amounts or percentages is right-aligned. Markdown tables escape | inside cells and mark alignment in the rule row with colons.

Example

The sample CSV becomes three aligned columns: the Name column is 12 columns wide (“Ada Lovelace”), Role is 8 (“Engineer”, “Designer”) and Hours is 5. The Hours column holds only numbers, so 38, 7.5 and 40 are right-aligned, and a dashed rule appears under the header row. 김민지 counts as 6 columns.