iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Working with Table Styles

As you settle into a groove with your spreadsheets, you’ll likely develop a set of consistent visual habits for formatting your tables, using the same color schemes, border styles, and font choices over and over again. That steady consistency is a good thing; it not only reinforces the professional brand or personal style of your documents, but it also gives regular readers of your documents (including you) subtle cues for understanding different parts of your data. It’s a good practice, for example, to craft a visual system that distinguishes different kinds of tables. Tables that contain only summary calculations from other tables’ data might use a gray background to indicate that they shouldn’t be edited. Tables for income might use pale green headers, and tables for expenses pale red. Static reference data might have a pale yellow background. You get the idea.

The last few pages have shown you how to do exactly that type of table formatting, styling the colors, borders, and text of individual tables. But as you add more tables to your spreadsheet and more documents to your collection, you’ll find that meticulously reformatting every single table to match your personal preferences quickly becomes a dreary chore.

Numbers anticipates this problem by letting you save and reuse table styles, predefined collections of formatting rules that you can apply to any table with the click of a mouse. Add a table, click a style, and presto, you’ve got the colors, borders, ...