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In Publisher, using text boxes to lay out your content isn’t always the best choice. For some publications, you may want to use tables instead, which will let you organize your content in rows and columns, rather than blocks of text.
We also discussed inserting tables into your Publisher 2010 publication in the Home tab – Objects tutorial, so this will be a repeat of the same material.
We have a brochure below in which we need to add horse boarding services and rates. This would be a good opportunity to utilize a table.
To insert a table, all you have to do is go to the Objects group of the Home tab and locate the Tables button. When you click on Table a grid will open. Move your mouse over the grid for the number of columns and rows you want. We are going to select a table with two columns and four rows. Click on the table once you have your columns and rows selected and you can start entering data.
You can click any cell to select it, or use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate.
Move the table to the desired location and resize it as needed. Just place your cursor on the edge, then drag and drop it to the new location. To adjust the size, use the sizing handles on the sides or the corners. Now we can start entering our text.
Adding more columns or rows to a table is easy. We need to insert another row below “Shared Paddock”, so I will right click and go to Insert. My options include inserting a column to the left or right of where my cursor is, or a row above or below. If we click Below, a row appears under “Shared Paddock”, where my cursor was just a minute ago.
Similarly, you can delete a row or column by right clicking in the cell of the column or row and select Delete from the menu. You will have the option to delete the row or column.
Now that the data is complete, we can take a look at the tools that appear any time you have your table selected, starting with the Design tab. We will discuss the more commonly used functions in this tab.
Here, you can format your table by choosing a table style. As you hover your mouse cursor over the different formats, you can see a live preview of how your table will look. Click on your desired table format and the table will automatically update.
The Borders group of the Table Tools Design tab, allows you to change the thickness and color of your borders. You can also choose to remove/add borders as you see fit for your table.
We want to add an outside border to our table. First we will select the table and click the drop down menu for the border thickness and select 3 pt. Next, we will choose our line color from the drop down menu, and then select the outside border from the Borders drop down menu.
You can make further adjustments to things like the size and layout of your table by going to the Layout tab.
The first thing we are going to do is adjust the cell margins, which, by default, are very thin. To change that, click the Cell Margins command, and make your choice from the menu.
The next thing we are going to do is select the right column and change the text alignment.
As shown in the image to the right, the Alignment group of the Table Tools Layout tab has text alignment option in the red box. For our example, we chose the middle one, Align Center.
As you can see, the Layout tab gives you lots of options for customizing your table, so it works for you, and the information you want to display.
This concludes the Tables tutorial.
Click next to continue to the Illustrations tutorial.