iWork 05: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Building Tables and Charts

Pages provides two special kinds of objects to add visual pizzazz to your documents and help you clearly communicate complex information: tables and charts. This chapter guides you through table and chart creation and formattingstarting with tables.

A table, also known as a matrix, is a rectangle containing rows and columns of cells . Each cell can contain a chunk of text or numbers . Pages can dress up tables or individual cells with borders and color or image fills for backgrounds. You can create very simple plain-text tablesas you might using just the tab key in a word processoror an elaborate construction filled with color and pictures that at first glance looks nothing like a table. Figure 5-1 shows a few examples.

Tables are a great way to clearly display a large amount of data, create forms, or quickly format a page full of pictures.