Office 2013 Digital Classroom

Word Lesson 5: Working with Tables

You can use the table design features in Word to build everything from a gridded web page layout to a 3˝ square monthly calendar. The Themes and quick formatting tools available in Office provide enormous flexibility in designing flexible, readable presentations of tabular data.

What you’ll learn in this lesson:

• • About several methods for drawing tables in your ­document
• • Entering, editing, and sorting alphanumeric table data
• • Formatting text in and around tables
• • Using AutoFit to create elegant table layouts ­automatically

Starting up

You will work with files from the Word05lessons folder. Make sure that you have loaded the OfficeLessons folder onto your hard drive from www.digitalclassroombooks.com/Office2013. If you need further instructions, see “Loading lesson files” in the Starting up section of this book.

The uses of tables

A table in Word is a matrix of rows and columns with optional column and row headings. There are two kinds of tables you might use: invisible grids used to line up elements of a design (such as the implied grid of a newspaper page), and visible grids meant to highlight a collection of structured data, such as a list of phone numbers appearing in a report. Gridded layout is a popular topic in graphic design, particularly web design, where rendering a page in an ever-changing browser window presents a variety of ...