Creative Ideas - Tables

Quick reference

• 00:04 All right, in this video we're going to talk about tables.
• 00:07 Tables are awesome.
• 00:08 In fact, when I float my mouse, the tool tip says,
• 00:10 a table is a great way to organize information within your document.
• 00:14 So when you hit the dropdown arrow, we have two options.
• 00:16 You can just float your mouse, I'm not even clicking and dragging,
• 00:19 I'm just moving my mouse, through the grid to kind of tell it how many columns and
• 00:22 rows I want.
• 00:24 And when I click, there it is, I just dropped that in here.
• 00:27 Now I can fill in the header, maybe I'm doing a employee list, first name,
• 00:30 last name, address, and then city, and then state.
• 00:34 Okay, fine.
• 00:35 So that's fine.
• 00:37 Now take a look over on the left-hand side on my page navigation.
• 00:39 Only the top row showed up.
• 00:42 Well, what we can do is actually apply color to it.
• 00:45 See, we have this little gallery here?
• 00:47 And when we use a gallery and apply lines inside the grid,
• 00:51 then they'll show up on the page navigation.
• 00:54 All right, I'm going to do this same thing again, but a different way.
• 00:57 I'm going to move that up, go back to my Insert Table, but
• 01:00 instead of using this grid, I'm going to come down here to the Insert Table.
• 01:04 When I click this one, now I can actually tell it, okay,
• 01:07 I want five rows and I want four columns.
• 01:10 Okay, and when I hit OK, that precisely drops in there.
• 01:13 Your personal preference, doesn't matter to me.
• 01:16 And the most important thing you need to know is that the Gallery and
• 01:20 the Design Toolbar is all about decorating, putting color in here,
• 01:24 making it look the way you want it to look for whatever reason, all right?
• 01:28 So I'm going to take this a step further and
• 01:30 we're going to abandon the Design section, because that's pretty self-explanatory.
• 01:35 So we're going to go into the Layout section.
• 01:37 Now watch what happens when we come to Layout.
• 01:39 These are the important buttons.
• 01:41 These are where you actually get the work done.
• 01:43 So we can view our gridlines or turn off our gridlines.
• 01:46 Well, actually, at this point, it doesn't matter,
• 01:48 because I've got color on my gridlines.
• 01:50 So let me take the color off of that particular one, go back to Normal.
• 01:55 And now on the Layout, I can View Gridlines, see, they showed up, see.
• 02:01 Make sure you can see that, see those outlines?
• 02:03 Those are non-printable lines.
• 02:06 And if I turn them off, you can't see them at all, because I took off my borders.
• 02:09 So I'll just have my gridlines.
• 02:11 Actually, I kind of like a table without lines on it.
• 02:13 It looks cleaner in my opinion.
• 02:15 All right, I can delete the entire table, or if I click into just one cell,
• 02:19 it's going to ask me if I want columns or rows deleted.
• 02:22 Delete Columns, Delete Rows just showed up.
• 02:25 Now check out this, the Insert Above, I can insert a row above my mouse.
• 02:30 I can insert rows below, insert a column to the left, insert a column to the right.
• 02:35 Hm, I guess the whole thing was selected.
• 02:37 So let me see, if I just select one column and insert columns to the left, there.
• 02:44 Now it just gave me a single column.
• 02:46 All right, diagonals.
• 02:47 This is interesting.
• 02:48 I used to do this years ago.
• 02:50 I worked for a company, see, I was in offices before computers were there.
• 02:54 And when we took inventory,
• 02:55 we had these cool forms with these diagonal lines in them.
• 02:59 And what we would do is, we would enter how many items were left on the shelf and
• 03:04 how many items we needed to order, okay?
• 03:07 Make sure the alignment is correct, so left on the top diagonal and
• 03:11 aligned right on the bottom diagonal.
• 03:13 Then everything will type in just fine.
• 03:16 So two are left on the shelf and I need to order three more.
• 03:20 And so just like that, it's kind of cool.
• 03:21 So you can divide these up and actually type in one cell with the diagonal.
• 03:25 And those diagonals will print as you can see on the left-hand side.
• 03:28 All right, you can change Text Direction, Hyphenation, Cell Margins.
• 03:32 Now, the Cell Margins is how close do you
• 03:34 want the data to type to the edge of the cell?
• 03:37 Usually I just leave mine default to how it's set to narrow.
• 03:40 Very rarely do I change this to no margins at all, but
• 03:44 every once in a while, you need something to fit.
• 03:47 You don't want your margins.
• 03:49 And of course, wrap text.
• 03:50 If you're going to be typing anything that is going to be too long for the cell,
• 03:54 you have the option to wrap the text within the cell.
• 03:56 And there we go.
• 03:58 All right, and let's see.
• 04:00 A table is an object.
• 04:01 So that object could be brought forward or sent backward and aligned.
• 04:05 We could rotate this.
• 04:06 You can spin the wheel right up here on the top of it.
• 04:09 You can do anything you want.
• 04:11 Treat it like an object.
• 04:12 But technically, a table does contain information.
• 04:14 A table is useful in other areas, mail merges.
• 04:17 You can export this to Excel or basically copy-paste this into Excel and
• 04:21 it would work just fine.
• 04:23 I like them.
• 04:24 They're necessary for flyers and publications occasionally,
• 04:27 if you want to have a calendar layout or any kind of information.
• 04:31 So with that, go ahead and have fun with tables.
• 04:34 It's a great feature to know about because all of Microsoft programs use tables and
• 04:39 have a table feature.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.