Discover the straightforward process of creating and customizing tables in your reports or presentations. This article guides you through adding and formatting data, as well as aligning and stylizing cells for an enhanced visual appeal.
Key Insights
- The article provides a simple procedure to add a table into your document: create a table with the specified number of rows and columns, input the data, and then adjust the size of the rows to fit the data.
- For better presentation and easier data differentiation, the article recommends aligning all cells to the bottom, filling the first column with black at 10 opacity, and using 'pd color 1' for the fill of the top row.
- Once the data has been input and the table structured, final touches such as bolding specific text and using the eyedropper tool for consistency in text color are suggested to enhance the overall look of the table.
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In this video, we're going to add an additional table. So let's begin first by hitting W on the keyboard, and let's copy our "Additional Services" title, holding ALT, and dragging it down below.
From here, within Properties, we're going to unalign it from the baseline grid. Let's replace this by triple-clicking, and we're going to replace it with "References."
Next, we're going to add our table. In order to do so, let's open up our folder, and from here we're going to open up our Reference Contact List. Here we've got a couple of different contacts.
Feel free to print this out or set it off to the side, and we can copy these materials for our table. Next, we'll need to add our table. We'll go to Table > Create Table, and in this case, we're going to have three rows with four columns and one header row. We'll click OK.
From here, we'll drag our table across and line it up all the way across, and we now have our table. Next, we're going to input the data. We'll add "Name, " and then, holding Shift, we'll hit ENTER and add "Title."
On the top row in our second cell, we'll add "Phone Number." In the third cell, we'll add "Email, " and in the fourth, we'll add "Company." Down below, then, we'll begin by adding the data.
We'll add "Name, " and then, holding Shift, we'll hit ENTER and type "President." Feel free to input the rest of the data here, and I'll join you soon. Once you've completed adding all of the data, we're ready to begin formatting.
As we can see here, we have a lot of data, and not all of it fits together. So let's begin by adjusting the size of our rows. In this case, we'll hold Shift and drag this row just a bit over to the right,
Trying to leave ourselves as much space as possible while also keeping "Head of Construction" within the cell. Next, we'll hold Shift and drag to the left to reduce the phone number size. Finally, let's see if we can get the entire email in one cell.
Here, we'll click inside and select all the cells by hitting CTRL+A. With all of them selected now, feel free to align to the top, center, or bottom—depending on what you'd prefer. For me, I'm going to align to the bottom. Now let's stylize these cells. We'll start with this first column here, and for the fill, I'm going to select black.
However, we're only going to set it at 10% opacity. If we click outside, we can see what this looks like. Next, let's select our text frame and click this top row. For the fill here, we'll see a question mark because it's partially black and partially No Fill. Instead, we'll select it and choose PD Color 1. If we click outside, we can see what this looks like. In this case, this cell right here—we'll select and choose PD Color 1. From here, we'll also select the row, and for our text color, we're going to choose Paper.
As our next stylization task, let's select "Name, " and we're going to bold it to distinguish it from the title. We'll do the same thing with each of our names, selecting Bold. We
Can use the Eyedropper tool to simply drag over the text. If we hit W now, we'll see that we've completed our References.
At this point, feel free to make any additional changes to the stylization of any of these tables, and let's save our work by hitting CTRL+S on the keyboard to save. In the next video, we'll begin working on our Precedence page. See you there!