iWork '05: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Building Tables and Charts

Pages provides two special kinds of objects to add visual pizzazz to your documents and help you clearly communicate complex information: tables and charts. This chapter guides you through table and chart creation and formatting—starting with tables.

A table, also known as a matrix, is a rectangle containing rows and columns of cells. Each cell can contain a chunk of text or numbers. Pages can dress up tables or individual cells with borders and color or image fills for backgrounds. You can create very simple plain-text tables—as you might using just the tab key in a word processor—or an elaborate construction filled with color and pictures that at first glance looks nothing like a table. Figure 5-1 shows a few examples.

Tables are a great way to clearly display a large amount of data, create forms, or quickly format a page full of pictures.

Making Tables

You can add tables to a Pages document either as fixed or in-line objects, with one important distinction: fixed tables are limited to one page, while in-line tables can span several pages. (Pop back to Section 4.2 for a recap of the difference between fixed and inline objects.)

How many cells can you put in a table? Though you'd be hard pressed to think up a need for such a table, as far as Pages is concerned, a table can be as small as one cell: one column wide by one row high. At the other extreme, Pages can make tables up to 20 columns wide. A fixed table can fill an entire page with as many ...