Microsoft Office Word 2003 Inside Out (Bpg-Inside Out)

Now that you've been through many of these table features on your own—from creating tables to editing, resizing, and formatting them—you can work on some of the finer points of table management. The Table Properties dialog box enables you to make choices about how you want your table to behave, both with text in a document and in a Web browser window. To display the Table Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 13-11, click in the table and then choose Table, Table Properties.

Figure 13-11: The Table Properties dialog box enables you to make sizing and behavior choices for your tables.

Controlling Table Size

In the Table Properties dialog box, the Size options in each of the tabs—Table, Row, Column, and Cell—include the choices you need to set the preferred width or height measurements for each item.

• Preferred Width Refers to the size at which the item is displayed by default, if space allows.

• Measure In Determines whether the size is kept to a precise measurement or is figured as a percentage of available display space.

  Tip

  Use the Percent option  The Percent option in the Measure In box enables you to create a table that's reformatted to fit a Web page each time a user resizes his or her browser window. Having this kind of flexibility makes your tables that much more effective. Table, Column, and Cell tabs all have the capacity to accept a Percent setting. The Row tab doesn't need the Percent option because rows are controlled by the Column settings for the table.

Aligning Tables with Text

The way in which your text aligns with the table you create is controlled on the Table tab in the Table Properties dialog box. You can choose Left, Center, and Right alignment, which act as follows:

• Left Positions the table along the left text margin.

• Center Centers the table between the left and right text margins.

• Right Aligns the table along the right text margin.

Another option in the Alignment section of the Table tab in the Table Properties dialog box enables you to indent the table from the left margin by a specific increment. The default is set to 0, and you can increase that setting as needed.

Aligning Cells

The Cell tab in the Table Properties dialog box includes an alignment setting that controls the vertical alignment of data in table cells. This setting enables you to choose the alignment of text within a cell, and is related to the choices you can make on the Tables And Borders toolbar when you click Align.

Controlling Text Wrap

Text wrap becomes a very important consideration when you're working with multiple tables in a long document. On the Table tab in the Table Properties dialog box, you have the option of choosing None—which means text will not wrap around the table at all but appear above and below it—or Around, which flows text up to and around the table.

When you click Around, the Positioning button becomes available. Click Positioning to display the Table Positioning dialog box (shown in Figure 13-12), which allows you to make choices that control where the table is positioned in your document by default.

Figure 13-12: The Table Positioning dialog box enables you to control the default table position for your document.

These choices include the following:

• The horizontal and vertical positioning of the table (choose Left, Right, Center, Inside, or Outside)

• The element to which the table position is relative (choose Margin, Page, Column for the horizontal position and Margin, Page, Paragraph for the vertical position)

• The space you want to leave between the table and surrounding text

• Whether you want to allow the text to overlap the table boundary and whether you want the table to stay fixed in place or move with text if it is reformatted

  Note

  Different tables require different settings. Take the time to experiment with the best effects for your particular table.

Controlling Table Breaks

Two options on the Row tab of the Table Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 13-13, control the way in which the table is divided in the event of a section or page break. If you want to allow Word to break the table at a specified point in the table, click Next Row or Previous Row to select the row after which you would allow a break. Then select the Allow Row To Break Across Pages check box.

Figure 13-13: Choose whether you want to allow a table to be divided by a page or section break on the Row tab in the Table Properties dialog box.

If you want to repeat the column headings in the second section of the divided table, select the Repeat As Header Row At The Top Of Each Page check box. This will ensure that your table heads are replicated at the beginning of the next table segment.