Working with Tables
When you need to organize information in a series of rows and columns, you don’t have to draw and arrange a text box for each bit of data. You can instead create a table, which has cells formed by the intersections of rows and columns. When you create a table using these steps, you specify the number of rows and columns and pick the initial table design:
1. | Display the page in the publication on which you’d like to insert the table. Clicking a page icon in the status bar takes you there. |
2. | Click the Insert Table button on the Objects toolbar. This button is the third down from the top and looks as though it has a grid on it. |
3. | Drag diagonally on the publication to specify the table’s location and size. When you release the mouse button, the Create Table dialog box appears. |
4. | Change the Number of Rows and Number of Columns settings as desired to set up the table. |
5. | Select a format to apply in the Table Format list. As shown in Figure 31-21, the Sample area in the dialog box displays the appearance of the selected formatting. Figure 31-21. Create a table by specifying rows, columns, and format.
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6. | Click OK. The table will appear in the specified location. If Publisher needs to resize the table frame to accommodate the number of rows and/or columns you specified, a prompt appears to ask you to confirm the resize. Click Yes to have Publisher size the table as needed. |
Tip
You also can open the Create Table dialog box by selecting Table 
Insert 
Table. After you make your choices and click OK, Publisher automatically places the table on the current publication page, on which you can move and resize it as needed.
Entering and editing table data
When the new table appears, the insertion point appears in the upper-left cell. Simply type the entry for each cell and press Tab to move on to the next cell. If you type more text than the cell can initially handle, Publisher wraps the text to the next line and increases the row height as needed. You can press Shift+Tab to back up to a previous cell as needed.
To edit the entry in any particular table cell, click the cell and then make the desired changes by selecting and replacing text or using editing keys such as Backspace. When you finish entering and editing table text, click outside the table to deselect it.
Click a table at any time to reselect it.
Working with the table format
As with other objects you’ve seen in this chapter, you can right-click on a table and then click Format Table to open the Format Table dialog box. Note that the settings on the Colors and Lines tab apply only to the selected cell—the cell on which you right-clicked to open the dialog box. If you want to work with colors and fills for more than one cell, you have to select those cells before right-clicking and selecting Format Table. To select cells, first click the table. Then drag over the cells to select. You also can move the mouse pointer outside the table boundary above a column or to the left of a row that you want to select. When the mouse pointer changes to a black arrow pointing to the row or column, clicking the mouse selects the entire row or column. Also note that the Format Table dialog box includes a Cell Properties tab, on which you can change the vertical text alignment, margins, and text rotation for the selected cells.
One last table skill that’s handy to know is how to resize the width of a table column. To do so, point to the right border of the column until you see the resizing pointer, which appears at the far right of the Monday row in Figure 31-22. Then drag left or right to fix the column width as desired.
Figure 31-22. Drag to adjust table column width.
