Creating a table in PowerPoint - PowerPoint Tutorial

- [Instructor] Another type of content that you might add to a presentation is a table. Tables are great ways to organize text-based information. Whether it be numbers or just raw data. The use of a table allows for columns and headers, which just organizes the information. Let's add a table to a new slide and then fill it in with some extra data. Now, I'm going to switch over to Word, and I've opened up some information that was already saved in a Word doc inside the exercise files. I'm going to copy this title, highlight the text, and press Control + C. And now let's switch back to PowerPoint. Let's navigate to the slide with the control cycle and insert a new slide after this. We'll go with Title and Content. Now we can triple-click and choose to paste. I'll tell it to use the Destination theme so it keeps the formatting. And just remove the extra space. Now down here, you'll see we can choose the type of content that we want. And there's lots of options. I'm going to go with the first one here to insert the table. Now I just need to specify a few details about that table. I want to have four columns across and four rows of information. I can click OK, and you see it places it on the slide. Now there are lots of options here that we can try for different styles. These colors are based upon the theme. Let's go with this burnt orange here. If I want, I can also audition additional options here for shading and borders. Let's switch back to Word and copy the data. I'll highlight these fields here and choose to copy that information. Now we'll go back to PowerPoint. Click on that first field there, and from home, you'll see our option to paste. Let's audition our different options here. The destination style keeps the formatting from the theme, but we can paste with the source formatting, embed the actual graphic, or paste it as a picture, or just the text. I'm going to choose to use the destination style. Now let's format this a bit. I'm going to bump up the overall font size here a little. Let's take that to three lines. And for the top here, I want to change that formatting so it's aligned in the middle. That looks good. And let's make this just a little bigger. We'll highlight this text and bump up the size. Now in this case, this is actual text, not a spreadsheet. So if I decide to format this, I can. It's just important to note that it's not an actual mathematical formula, so you'd have to do the math by hand. I'll show you a workaround in a moment. But formatting this as text sometimes makes it a bit easier to maintain the visual style. Let's go ahead and highlight those cells now, and we'll set those to right justified. Now, in this case, if I try to do a mathematical formula, you see it doesn't work. Now, let's go ahead and insert another table here. But this time I'll choose Excel spreadsheet. And you see it puts an actual functional spreadsheet into the document. So I can type in the numbers. 74, Tab, 45, Tab. And I'll say that this is equal to first number minus second number and press Return. 66, Tab, 44. And 62, Tab, 40. Now with this first cell selected, I can just drag down, and you see it does the rest of my math. And that's useful because we can use those numbers there for quick reference. Let's just drag them to the bottom here. Now I could feel confident in my math. We've got 29%, 22%, and another 22%. In this case, just highlight the text and press bold and give them a slightly different color so it stands out. We'll go with a nice burnt orange there. And let's tweak that just a little from the dropdown here under more colors. And you see I can customize that. I'll just make it a hair darker and click OK. Now we can get rid of this Excel spreadsheet. Now let's tweak the layout a little bit. I'll highlight these two columns, and under table design here, you see we can modify the colors. And from layout, I'm going to set these to 2.5 and press Enter. Now let's tweak this. We can make this one a little bit bigger. Take that to 2.7. And it updates. And how about this one to 2.3. And you see how the layout changes. Now, you can continue to tweak these, adjusting the individual sizes until it feels right. And of course, just drag there on the columns itself. But all in all, that's feeling pretty good. If you want to tweak this further, you can continue to modify things. For example, maybe I want to change the color here. Let's go to Home, and we'll set that top text there to white. And I think that stands out a little bit better for the header row. I like this one here, it's just a little bit big for my taste. So we'll bounce down that font size just a bit, and align it so it's centered in the middle. Let's do the same here. Now, how you do this is up to you. And obviously it's a bit of personal taste, but what we're trying to go for is a consistent look. I don't like that these aren't the same height, so I'm going to highlight those, go back to that layout tab there, and take a look here at the option. So I'll choose Distribute Rows. And you see now that they're evenly distributed at the same height. It balanced those out between the three. All in all, these options here, when something is selected under the layout controls, work quite nicely to visually balance the table. That's looking pretty great. Let's go ahead and do a Save As, and I'll promote that to stage seven. Now we can move on and start to look at some additional text controls.