Table It!...Part 8...The Properties

With your mouse, right-click in any cell of a table and the popup menu appears. The popup menu is context sensitive, which means that you will see table-related menu options only when your cursor is located in the cell of a table.

If you select the option Table Properties, the following dialog (or one similar to it) appears.

You've seen this before in Part 4.

Properties are a group of tabs that allows you to control tables more precisely. Depending on how you work and what your preferences are, you might be perfectly happy with using the ruler (remember the ruler) and menu selections; however, a few changes are easier on Properties tabs. Of note, when you make changes using Properties tabs, the changes apply to the entire table (unless you make other choices).

Table Tab
This tab allows you to dictate the width of the table you insert in your document. For example, if you want a small table that takes up only one half of an 8 1/2 x 11 inch page, you would want a table that is never more than 4.25" wide. Here's a sample of what the table might look like.

Hidden codes are visible so that you can see all of the markings. Here are the choices I made on the Table tab to get the result above.

Create your own table and reproduce the table and text that I have above, and then start clicking the different options in Alignment and Text wrapping to see how it affects your table.

The Table Positioning dialog, which you can see after pressing the Positioning button, allows you to make additional adjustments; that is, you can fine tune the table.

A few other buttons are on this tab too: Borders and Shading and Options. I'll talk about these additional buttons in the next post.