Editing a piped in stream?

[Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net>]

Subject line is poorly phrased.
While working on a problem {solved by a different approach} I had:
   ls -l /dev/disk/by-label/ | cut -f 10,12 -d ' ' data.txt
I would then manually edit data.txt by replacing the space character 
between the two fields with a tab.

I suspect I should be able to do:
   ls -l /dev/disk/by-label/ | cut -f 10,12 -d ' ' | *something* > 
prettydata.txt

I searched for examples/tutorials found that it should be conceptually 
possible. However the examples I found were processing streams I didn't 
understand.

What should I be looking for?
TIA