In Microsoft Word, how do I align words across lines regardless of length?

I have the following lines of text I wish to format:

I was certainly 
rather taken aback
when I heard
they were engaged

I would like to format these lines in MS Word into a grid X x Y words and lines such that the beginning of each word of each line lines up with the equivalent number of word above it, then contains white space equivalent to the longest word as needed. Stack Overflow the text would look like this if the grid were 3 words x 5 lines:

Almost as if each word were in a cell of a table, the horizontal width of each cell equal to the longest word in any cell of that column, and then each word left aligned in its cell.

But I don't want to do this with a table, because I would like to be able to do this type of formatting quickly and flexibly, regardless of whether I am feeding 3 words x 5 lines, 2 words x 6 lines, or 8 words x 10 lines... I also don't want to fiddle with typing spaces for each word as I would like to be able to change the words themselves and have the formatting automatically adjust.

I would really like it to be like a style I can apply in one or two clicks or shortcuts to any X x Y lines of text I enter.

I can't find an example anywhere of what I am trying to do, so I don't even know if this type of formatting has a name in typography jargon. If this is much easier to do in a program other than Word I would like to know that as well, though I would hope Word could do this.

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