iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Working with Rows and Columns

Filling table cells quickly is all well and good—after all, that’s how you’ll spend most of your time as you work with your spreadsheet. But although cells may be where you actually sling your data, it’s the rows and columns that hold the whole thing to together and keep your info organized. Good row and column management makes for good table manners. It’s also efficient. This section shows you the fastest ways to add, insert, delete, resize, and hide rows or columns, letting you grow or prune your table quickly as the need arises.

Note

As you squeeze and stretch a table’s rows and columns, its overall size naturally changes, too. When you have other tables or objects on the sheet, Numbers nudges the positions of those objects relative to your growing or shrinking table. This prevents the table from running over other objects when it gets larger, or from creating too much space between objects when it gets smaller. You can prevent Numbers from doing this in the General pane of the Numbers → Preferences window: Turn off the “Automatically move objects when tables resize” checkbox.

Adding and Deleting Rows or Columns

When you’ve selected one or more of a table’s cells, the table sprouts four gripped handles at its corners; you can use three of them to add or remove cells at the edges of the table by dragging. With the exception of the top-left handle—the Table handle, which moves the table to a new position—the others resize the table as you drag, adding ...