Formatting Tables

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Formatting Tables' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Adjusting Alignment of Table Cells
Place text in the cells of a table, and that text is normally aligned according to the paragraph formatting that existed before the table was created. If you want, you can adjust the text alignment to anything you want.

Adjusting Text to Fit into Table Cells
Need a way to make sure your text fits within the space available in a table cell? Word has a handy setting that will adjust your text's format, as necessary, to make it fit.

Applying Consistent Shading to a Table
Formatting tables can be very time consuming. When you get a document from another person, you can spend a lot of time formatting their tables, as well. Here's a couple of ways you can shorten the table-formatting time you need to spend.

Distributing Table Rows
When designing a table, you may want the height of each row to be evenly distributed across the vertical space you've assigned to the table. Word makes this adjustment easy.

Making the Cells of a Table Square
Inserting a table is fast and easy in Word. You may want to make sure that the cells in the table are as square as possible. Here's how to do this task.

Shading Table Rows
Need to format the rows of a table so that your data is showcased better? Here are a few ways you can get the shading you need.

Specifying the Height of Table Rows
Word normally makes table rows just the right height to fit whatever size of text you are using. You can specify different row heights for each row of your table, if you so desire.

Using AutoFit to Adjust Column Width
Need to adjust the width of a bunch of table columns according to what is in the columns? Word provides a tool to do this, called AutoFit. Here's how to apply it to your tables.

Vertically Spacing Rows in a Table
One way that you can add vertical space around information in a table is to adjust paragraph spacing. This tip illustrates how you can best use this technique.