Improve tables with formatting

- [Instructor] Tables may not be new to you. You might create these in Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint, Word, or even Outlook. I'm going to show you a couple ways to quickly create tables, and then polish them up a bit with formatting. Let's get started by creating a table on the page that you see here. In just about every Microsoft application, you'll find that you can create a table by selecting Table from the Insert tabbed ribbon. Recently, though, while attending a technology educator's conference, I learned an awesome shortcut that I must share with you.

We're going to start by typing in the headers of this table. I'm going to just type in a little bit of information here, like, you know, the guest name. You'll notice that it starts typing that within that container, but the minute that I press the Tab key on my keyboard, watch what happens. We've started creating a table. We've now moved from this cell that contained Guest Name to the next cell over in the same row. So, let's go ahead and add a couple of other headers to this table. Press Tab one more time, and we're moving on to the next one, and we'll end it with the special notes about our VIP guests.

Now that we have the headers of our table, we're going to press Enter to move on down and create another row in this table, and there you go. We're ready to start entering the information within this table. Now, the table actually resides within a container, meaning that we can move this anywhere we want on the page, or maybe even copy and paste it somewhere else. While we have this table selected, though, let's polish it up by actually adding some formatting. With the table selected, if we take a look at the tabbed ribbon names at the top, you're going to notice that there's a new one there, and it's called Table Tools Layout, and it's highlighted with a little bit of a darker version of that OneNote purple color.

Well, this is by design. It's actually saying, hey, here's a new tab that you usually don't have to work with in this application. It's not part of the standard tabbed ribbons. It sees that we're working in a table, and it's acknowledging that and saying, you want to take a look at how you might be able to customize this a bit more? So, let's give the Layout tab a click. Now, with this Layout tab, a lot of these things are grayed out at the moment, and the reason is because we have everything in this table selected. So, if we click within a cell within that table, notice how everything on that ribbon becomes active and is available for us to use.

If we needed to, maybe, I don't know, insert maybe a new row, or insert a new column, let's do that, maybe between Guest Name and Rewards Number we want to add a new column. We're going to go to the Insert group, and we're going to insert a new column to the left of where the mouse is currently positioned. There we go, we have a new column inserted. Now, what if we want to call out these headers, have them stand out a bit more from the rest of the information that's going to be entered within this table? We can select all the cells, like I've just done here, and from that same Layout ribbon, next to the Insert group we were just working in, within the Format group, you'll see that there's a paint can that's spilling.

That's Shading. Let's go ahead and pick a blue color to shade this header. There you go. 'Course, we can also delete certain elements of this table, from the Delete group. We can delete the entire table, or delete columns or rows. And, over to the right here, we could make some alignment adjustments. Right now, you can see that all of these titles in the header are left-aligned. Instead of having these headers left-aligned, we could change that and make them centered, or even right-aligned. I hope you find these Create Table shortcuts and formatting tips to be a great time-saver.