Carol Bratt

You may not realize it when you first insert a table, but MS Word includes some non-printing gridlines around the table. You can't normally see the gridlines because they are obscured by the border that Word formats tables with by default. The ... purpose of gridlines is to mark the boundaries of the table and each cell in the table when you have the table formatted for no border. You have complete control over whether gridlines are displayed or not. To turn them off, you simply need to choose Hide Gridlines from the Table menu. When you later want them back on, choose the same option again. The ... (view more)

Splitting cells is the opposite of the Merge Cells operation. The Split Cells feature allows you to split cells into two or more cells. To do so, select the cell, and then: Choose Table | Split Cells. Right-click and choose Split Cells. Click the ... Split Cells button on the Tables and Borders toolbar. Click the Draw Table button and drag a line to divide the cell. Any of the first three bullet points opens the dialog box. Here you can specify how many cells to create out of the original. The final bullet point allows you to bypass the dialog box. Visit Carol's web site to learn more tips like ... (view more)

Whether you're working with a complex or a simple grid-like table, you may want to merge or combine cells to make a single cell. You use this, for example, when you want to have a title span several columns, or a heading the height of several rows. ... Other times you want to split a cell into two or more cells. To merge cells, select the cells and use any of the following techniques: Choose Table | Merge Cells. Right-click and choose Merge Cells. Click the Merge Cells button on the Tables and Borders toolbar. Click the Eraser button and drag across the gridline separating the cells. The cells ... (view more)

Another way to create a table in MS Word is to draw it by using two buttons found on the Tables and Borders toolbar. Using your mouse, you can drag a rectangle on the screen and then divide it into rows and columns of varying sizes and shapes. When ... the table you're creating is a simple grid, using the Table button works well. But sometimes you want larger and smaller cells, rows, having different numbers or sizes of columns, or various columns divided into several row arrangements. In this case, you can use the Draw Table feature to sketch out the exact structure of the table at the outset, ... (view more)

You've already learned how to add a new row to the bottom of a table by pressing Tab from the bottom-right cell in a table [refer to this article ]. You can also insert rows and columns between existing ones, using the methods below. Choose Table | ... Insert and specify where to insert the new row or column. The menu has a number of choices. To insert a row, first select the row that will move down to make room for the new row. (One way to do this is to move the mouse pointer to the far-left side of the table and click once.) Then click the Insert Row button that appears where the Insert button ... (view more)

You may think you can delete a row or column by selecting it and pressing Delete. But what that does is remove the text, leaving empty cells behind. To remove a row or column completely, you must select it and then choose a menu selection. Choose ... Table | Delete, and then specify Table, Columns, Rows, or certain cells. Right-click and choose Delete from the shortcut menu. If you have a row selected, the shortcut menu will say Delete Row; if you have a column selected, it will say Delete Column. When a column is deleted, the column widths may adjust themselves. The easiest way to delete an ... (view more)

When you're doing a long report or business letter or perhaps writing the great American novel, you often do not want the page number to appear on the first page. You have the choice of clearing the check box to show a page number on the first page ... of your document when inserting page numbers, but MS Word gives you even more flexibility by allowing you to format the first page differently from subsequent pages, specifically in what text appears in the headers and footers. You can use unique headers and footers for the first page in a report for example, where the page number appears on the ... (view more)

Once you've begun a table, you can easily change its structure. You can change the width of the columns to fit the text, and you can also insert, delete and rearrange the rows and columns any way you like. Even though you established the overall ... table structure when you first created it, you may find that more or fewer columns or rows are needed after you start entering text. It would be a real pain if you had to delete the table and start all over again just because you needed to rearrange or restructure. Luckily, Word gives you great flexibility in modifying the table structure. Change ... (view more)

You know how to use Tabs in MS Word, but more often you will use tables to align text horizontally. Tables are used whenever you must keep items side by side. You do this by laying out a grid. The best thing about tables is that in the grid you can ... align any amount of text -- sentences, paragraphs or even pictures -- side by side. When you want to keep text side by side in a document, create a table. This grid-like structure can contain short text, such as a number, long text, a sentence, paragraph, or several paragraphs. A table keeps the items properly aligned in columns and rows, so you ... (view more)

An Excel worksheet is packed with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of cells containing data. You can either view the complete data region (the area where you have input data) in the worksheet, or magnify / reduce the selected data region to the ... size of the window using the following method: Select the current region. Press Ctrl + *. Choose View | Zoom. Select Fit selection. Click OK. Increase the amount of data that appears in the window by hiding window elements such as the sheet tabs, toolbars, formula bar and status bar. Choose Tools | Options. Select the View tab. Clear the check boxes ... (view more)