Using Tables to Organize Information

You might take one look at the neat row-and-column arrangement of Word tables and dis­miss them out of hand as a pale imitation of Excel worksheets. Big mistake! In fact, Word tables are at their weakest when pressed into service as repositories for rows and columns of numbers. Word has a paltry selection of tools for working with numbers. If you want to do any sort of arithmetic in a Word document—anything more complex than an occasional sum or product on a small handful of data—you are far better off embedding or linking an Excel range inside your Word document, even if you have to learn Excel to do it. So, what are Wind tables good for? Obviously, they are tailor-made for organizing and pre­senting price lists, feature comparisons, schedules, and other orderly arrangements of text. But Word tables are also excellent page layout tools that can help you precisely place words, numbers, and pictures on a page.

It might be obvious to you that we used a table to create the list of paid holidays—after all, each cell has a line around it and the data is classically tabular. But it might not be so obvious that we used a table to organize the header of list fax, as well. (Choose Show Gridlines from the Table menu to reveal the non­printing gridlines around the table.)

You should consider using tables when you need to perform any of the following tasks:

• Line up paragraph headings on the left with text on the right. Many resumes use this format.
• Draw intersecting; horizontal and vertical lines. Using tables is generally much simpler than trying to add borders around words or paragraphs.
• Create Fill in the blanks printed forms.

Questionnaire:

• Explain more about the using Tables to organize information in MS Office.