Streamline Your Word 365 Documents with Tables : A Quick How To Guide
For organising data, presenting information with clarity or for structure, tables are a useful tool in Microsoft Word 365.
For busy professionals, whilst creating a table might be easy, often the formatting and modifying can end up with you feeling frustrated and stressed.
But with a few handy tips in this blog post and video, you’ve have them working FOR you and not against you!
Let get started….
Why Should You Use Tables in Word 365 Document?
Tables in Word documents offer a range of benefits including:
- Information organisation – Tables help you set out information in your document in a simple and clear format that makes it easy to read.
- Formatting and Alignment simplification – change the formatting or alignment within the table with a few clicks aligning names, dates or monetary figures in each cell the same or differently depending on your needs.
- Risk Management – simplifies editing and table flow with tips such as Repeat Headers Rows which reduce the risk of your tables turning into a mess when you have multiple people working on it.
- Provide framework – tables provide a great framework for step by step training guides, meeting agendas or minutes making your documents look more professional with ease and simplicity.
- Professionalism – data in tables provides visual clarity making your documents look more professional. Particularly useful when documents are shared with colleagues or clients.
It doesn’t matter if you are a business administrator working with meeting minutes, a data analyst preparing a client report, or a creating client proposal, tables are a great way to make your document look more professional AND way easier to read.
Creating a Table in a Word 365 Document
With the document open:
- Position the cursor where you want to place the table.
[Pro Tip] If you are inserting a table at the very start of the document, you may want to press enter first to make it easier if you need to go back and put a heading in for example. - Type in a + sign, this represents where Word will put the column break, then press the hyphen key. The hyphen represents the number of spaces in that column. When you want to insert the column line break, just press the + key again.
- Continue the process ending the a + at the end for the final column line.
- Press Enter to insert a table with the column widths exactly as you spaced them.
[Pro Tips]
#1 At any time an extra row can be added to the table by clicking in the last cell of the table and pressing the Tab key.
#2 If the table spills over onto a second page, set up the table to repeat the header rows at the top of each new page by clicking the Table Layout tab and choosing Repeat Header Rows (it’s towards the right of the Table Layout tab)
Prefer to watch my video “how to”?
Just click the image below
- Once the table is inserted, columns or rows can be added, borders and shading adjusted and text alignment altered from the Table Design and Table Layout tabs.
Pro Tips
#1 If you have existing text you would like to convert into a table, highlight the text and click the Insert Tab > Click the drop arrow below the Table option and choose Convert Text to a Table from the menu
#2 Tables can also easily be cut and pasted elsewhere by clicking the + sign in the top left corner of the table and then choosing any cut and paste option to place it elsewhere!
Want to see it in action?
Click the image below
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