Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter II.5. Making Great Tables and Charts

In This Chapter

• Picking your table tools

• Making tables quickly

• Styling your tables

• Tips for working with tables

• Working with tables on the Web

• Graphing and charting your way

• Framing and anchoring

• Converting graphs to pictures and other formats

Tables and graphs have two virtues: They look great and they help portray your information in a more visual and aesthetic style. Of course, they also have the added virtue of making a good impression on your audience while conveying important information. So what if you have to tell them your company's stock is worthless? At least you can do so with style and grace. Word 2008 makes it easier than ever before to make great-looking tables with the new Quick Tables and Charts features. Be sure to check our tips for working with tables for instructions on how to select cells and ranges of cells.

Deciding Which Table Tools to Use

Microsoft realizes that tables are one of Word's most-used features. Consequently, Word lets you work with tables using a variety of different interface tools. In the next few sections, we show four entirely different ways to create a table:

• Using Quick Tables in the Elements bar

• Using the Tables button on the Standard toolbar

• Using your mouse with the Draw Table feature

• Using Word's Insert Table dialog

Each of these methods comes with an entire set of tools that you can use when working on your tables. This presents your authors with a particular problem. If we were to cover all the possibilities, ...