The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog

That’s a Table?!

Before I joined the Word team, when I thought about tables in Word, I thought of something like this:

After about a year of working on Word 2007, when I thought about tables in Word, I thought of something like this—thanks to the contextual presentation of Table Styles in Word 2007:

Then, after some lunches with and lessons from our resident table experts, I started to think about the following when I thought about tables in Word (please forgive the typo in the second heading):

This mental shift occurred after our table experts introduced me to using tables as a layout tool to help spice-up my document and to position graphics relative to text or other graphics. I'm a big fan of adding a bit of spice to documents and using all sorts of graphics to help get my points across, so I've become a big fan of using tables to:

• Add catchy "chunks" of content to documents

• Precisely position graphics relative to other graphics or text
• Simulate columns and reduce the vertical space taken up by a lists in Outlook 2007 (which uses Word 2007 as the "editing surface" for emails)

Add catchy "chunks" of content to documents

In the document above, the chunks of content in the upper left and lower right hand corners are tables. They don't look like tables because I fiddled with their borders a bit. Specifically, here's the same document with the chunks sans border fiddling:

Both chunks are really simple tables with the weight, color, and visibility of their borders customized. I did this by selecting the table, clicking on the Design tab of the Table Tools contextual tab, clicking on the Borders button, and the Borders and Shading option on the drop-down menu.

This gave me the following dialog that allowed me to customize the weight, color, and visibility of the borders. As you can see below I chose to show a 2 ¼ pt width dark red border on only the left and top of the first table.

I did something very similar with the other table. The only difference is that I specified to show only the border on the right and bottom sides of the table.

After the customization, I dropped in the content and that was it.

Precisely position stuff

As you may remember from a previous post, Live Preview and Galleries make positioning pictures much easier in Word 2007. This being said, when I need to get real precise with more than one picture, a chart, headings, and text…its table time.

For example, here's the document from above "showing" the table I used to position the two pictures, chart, headings, and text in the middle of the document:

All I did here was to create a three-column two-row table. Then I merged the first two cells in the top row using the Merge Cells button on the Layout tab of the Table Tools contextual tab.

Then I put my content into the cells, sized the columns appropreately by clicking and dragging them, and then hid all the borders by clicking on the Design tab of the Tables Tools contextual tab, clicking the Borders button, and then clicking the No Border option.

Reduce the vertical space taken up by a lists in Outlook 2007

When you write an email in Outlook 2007, you are actually writing in Word 2007.

This being said, the "Page" related Word commands are not available in Outlook 2007 email messages since emails aren't really made up of pages in the sense that Word documents are made up of pages (think 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper). So, if you have a long list of stuff in an email, you can't lay it out in columns like you do in Word (select the list, click on the Page Layout tab, click the Columns button, and click Three).

But, you can put the list in a three column one row table and hide the table borders (as we discussed above).

Finally

If you start using tables to spice-up the layout of your documents or as a tool to position graphics relative to text or other graphics, you'll start hiding your table borders frequently, and may become a fan of Table Gridlines. What are Table Gridlines? Table Gridlines show everywhere your borders would show if you didn't hide them, but Table Gridlines don't print. This makes them a great way to give yourself the context of table borders when editing your document, without affecting what you will print.

For example, below is the document I've talked about in this post with Table Gridlines showing. The Table Gridlines are the dotted blue lines where the table borders would be if they were showing.

Keep in mind that the document will print the same whether your Table Gridlines showing or not showing, so turn them on or off as you see fit by going to the Design tab on the Table Tools contextual tab, clicking the Borders drop down menu, and clicking the View Gridlines button [see screen shot below].

Hope this is useful.

-Jonathan