I copied the product and price columns from Excel into a WhatsApp message and got big uneven gaps; how do I fix that?
The culprit is the tab: when you copy two columns from Excel, each line has one tab character between them, and chat apps show it as a wide gap whose width varies from line to line. In the whitespace cleaner, turn on 'Convert tabs to spaces' and keep 'Collapse repeated spaces into one' on, as it is by default, and every tab becomes a single space.
A worked example
Two lines copied from a price sheet: 'Coffee', a tab, '50 SAR', and 'Tea', a tab, '20 SAR'.
With the default rules alone: nothing to clean. Tab conversion is off by default, and a tab is not a space that collapsing would merge.
With conversion on at 2 spaces per tab: the two tabs become 4 spaces, then collapsing merges two runs. Total changes 4, and the result is 'Coffee 50 SAR' and 'Tea 20 SAR' with a single space.
The 'Spaces per tab' list appears once conversion is on and offers 2, 4 and 8. Which one you pick hardly matters here, because collapsing merges the resulting spaces into one. The width only matters if you turn collapsing off: then each tab becomes, say, 4 spaces and the gap stays wide.
Steps
- Copy the two columns from Excel and paste them into the Whitespace cleaner.
- Tick 'Convert tabs to spaces'. The number of tabs converted shows next to the rule.
- Make sure 'Collapse repeated spaces into one' is ticked.
- Copy the result and paste it into WhatsApp Business.
Why the prices do not line up in a column
Conversion replaces each tab with a fixed number of spaces and does not try to align columns. Even if it did, chat apps show text in a font where letters have different widths, so prices will not line up under each other whatever you do. In a chat message it reads more clearly to separate name and price with a fixed mark than to rely on spacing.
In practice: after cleaning, replace the space between name and price with a colon or a short hyphen by hand, or write prices as 'Coffee: 50 SAR' from the start. That reads well on any phone.
Other things that come from Excel
- An empty cell at the start of a row means a tab at the start of the line. The trim-start rule removes it.
- Two empty cells between the columns mean two tabs in a row. We tried that on one line: 3 tabs were converted across the two lines, and collapsing turned the result into one space per line.
- Blank lines between product groups are collapsed to a single blank line by default.
Before sending a long message, check its length in words and characters with the Word and character counter.
Common questions
Does cleaning change the price figures?
No, the tool only touches spaces, tabs and blank lines.
Can I choose one space per tab?
The list offers 2, 4 and 8; with collapsing on, the result is a single space anyway.
Is my sheet sent to a server?
No, cleaning runs inside your browser.