Convert List to Columns

Horizontal fills row-by-row – items 1, 2, 3 sit in the first row; 4, 5, 6 in the second. Vertical fills column-by-column – items 1, 2, 3 stack down the first column; 4, 5, 6 down the second. Vertical is the newspaper/yearbook pattern (reading order down each column). With 7 items in 3 columns, vertical gives columns of length 3, 3, 1; horizontal gives rows of length 3, 3, 1.

When the grid is incomplete (item count not divisible by column count), the last row has empty cells. Without trimming, those still emit the column separator – e.g., with the double-space separator and a vertical fill, you’d see "3 " (trailing spaces). Trimming drops the visible trailing artifact. Uncheck if you want strict rectangular output for downstream parsing.

Strips leading and trailing whitespace from each item after splitting. So ", apple ,banana" with comma separator becomes ['apple', 'banana'] instead of ['', ' apple ', 'banana']. Important when alignment is on – leading spaces would otherwise misalign columns.

Yes – type a comma-separated header in the “Header Row” field (e.g., Name, Score, Status). It becomes the first output row, padded to match the data columns. If your header has fewer entries than columns, missing cells are blank; if more, they’re truncated.

The tool warns you. With tab separator and items like "HellotWorld", the tab inside the item creates an apparent extra column in the output. There’s no escaping – choose a separator your data doesn’t contain (Pipe or Custom :: are usually safe), or strip the offending character from the input first.

It only aligns visually in monospace fonts (Courier, Consolas, SF Mono, Menlo). The tool pads cells with regular space characters; proportional fonts render different glyphs at different widths so the visual alignment breaks. For Word/Google Docs paste, the underlying data is correct – switch the destination paragraph to a monospace font to see the alignment.

No hard limit; performance stays under 50 ms for 10,000 items in Chrome on a 2020 laptop. Very large lists (1M+ items) may stall the UI for a second; consider splitting into chunks. The output appears in a single textarea so browser memory becomes the practical ceiling.

Yes – pick “Tab” as the column separator and paste. Both apps recognize tab-delimited paste as multi-cell input and split it into separate columns automatically. For Excel, ensure the destination cell is selected before pasting so it expands across columns properly.

No. All splitting, gridding, padding, and joining happens in your browser using vanilla JavaScript. Open DevTools → Network and confirm zero requests fire after the page loads – even when you Convert. Safe for confidential employee lists, API tokens, internal product names.

Yes. Total bundle is under 22 KB. Once loaded, disconnect from the internet and keep converting – useful for prepping data in air-gapped environments or while flying.