Emacs has a flexible tool, align-regexp, for aligning text but it is surprisingly fiddly to use. For example to align a section of text like this:

the quick brown fox
jumped over the lazy
dogs the quick brown

into columns like this:

the     quick  brown  fox
jumped  over   the    lazy
dogs    the    quick  brown

you would highlight the text and use C-u M-x align-regexp \(\s-*\)\s- RET 1 RET 0 RET y. See what I mean!

The function is of course documented (use C-h f align-regexp to read it), but I found it a bit hard to follow. The \(\s-*\)\s- string is the regular expression that is used to align on, and the final \s- in that string tells emacs to align on a whitespace character. You could replace that with e.g. & to align on & characters. The other three options (i) control how the columns are justified (generally can leave this as 1); (ii) add spaces between columns; and (iii) repeat the alignment throughout the line.

To make life easier, I wrote a couple of simple wrappers around align-regexp for common tasks. The first aligns on whitespace, and the second aligns on & (useful for LaTeX tables).

(defun bjm/align-whitespace (start end)
  "Align columns by whitespace"
  (interactive "r")
  (align-regexp start end
                "\\(\\s-*\\)\\s-" 1 0 t))

(defun bjm/align-& (start end)
  "Align columns by ampersand"
  (interactive "r")
  (align-regexp start end
                "\\(\\s-*\\)&" 1 1 t))