I have found that creating tables in Word is something many people want to do to resolve many of their layout problems, particularly when displaying numbers, columnar text or wanting to design forms. However, it is common to start with tables as the obvious choice but then find even more problems occur than one might have anticipated. So, a few tips and tricks could be of assistance.
One of the first things that often causes problems is putting a table at the
top of a document. How many of you have done that and then decided you really
needed something else above it, only to find you couldn't click above the table?
The answer is to click in the first cell of the table and press ENTER or RETURN.
If the table is really the first thing in the file, then pressing ENTER or RETURN
with the cursor in the first cell will produce a return above the table.
Other commonly encountered problems are concerned with changing the width of
columns. If you increase the size of one column, the columns to left and right
change size, and the rest of the columns stay the same. You can end up with
one very thin column, and have to adjust each of the columns to the end of the
table.
If you hold down the SHIFT key when you are moving the column width, the column
to the left changes size, but not the rest of the columns. So for example the
first cell will be much bigger, but the rest of the cells will just move along
and the whole table will grow to accommodate the changed column. If you hold
down CONTROL while dragging the column border, the rest of the cells will change
size proportionally to each other. So for example you will end up with one large
cell and the rest smaller but the same size in relation to each other.
Using just a few of these keystrokes can help immeasurably if you have to format
a large number of tables. If this has fired your imagination, think about some
training - there are many other ways you can learn to make Word work for you…and
save you time.
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