Cockeyed Optimist

A little personal reminiscence.

When my department at the University of Queensland acquired its first PC (lo, my children, this was in the ancient times!), the only person allowed to use it was the departmental secretary, who was also the Director’s PA, in today’s terms.

She had been to secretarial college, and she knew everything there was to know about using the typewriter, and the Gestetner duplicator and the thermal copier; there were no photocopying machines then (lo, my children … - oh, shut up, Geoff!), and she was a whizz at it all, and rightly proud of this.

There were professional ways of doing everything. For instance, if you wanted to center a heading, you counted the number of characters in the heading, than you subtracted that from the line-length you were using, and then you divided this by 2, and that was the number of spaces you had to put at the beginning of the heading. All the spaces and letters were the same width, so it worked out well.

And (we come to the interesting bit now), when you were doing tables, you typed spaces between all the items until they lined up. Or if you really wanted to do it right, you would set out one line as a model for the rest, and then you would line up tab-stops with them (they were actual little metal thingies), and when you wanted to move from item to item, you hit the tab key, and the whole carriage would move over to the next tab position, with a clang.

Horizontal lines needed a bit of ingenuity, or you could just draw them in by hand.

And when I and my other nerdish friends tried to point out to her that she could do better on the PC, she was understandably offended, because she could see that her skills were no longer as valued.

Back to the present

Fast forward 25 years and I’m now in the business of editing students’ work, from two page essays up to 70,000 word doctoral dissertations, and I’m still coming across people who treat their computers as though they were typewriters.

In particular, they are still putting their tables together using spaces and tabs (and getting annoyed because the letters are not all the same size, so things won’t line up properly — unless they use a fixed-width font, like Courier — which is a pretend typewriter font anyway).

And all the time, Microsoft Word has a wonderfully comprehensive set of facilities for making and formatting tables that would knock your socks off!

Let’s suppose you want to make a table that looks like this:

Impressive, yes - must be very hard to do; no, not really, let’s see.

There are a number of ways to set up a table in Microsoft Word (there are a number of ways of doing almost everything in Word), so I will show you a fairly straightforward one.

First, go to the Table>Insert>Table menu item. That will bring up this palette:

First, set up the number of columns and rows you want, counting the smallest units in each case.

I make it 7 columns and 11 rows - do you agree?

So enter those values. Next, the other options: I would set ‘Autofit Behavior’ to ‘Autofit to window’, which means that your table will be as wide as your page. You can ignore the other settings for now. This gives you:

So, believe it or not, this is the foundation for building your table. The first thing I would do is to merge a few cells. Look at the heading, for instance. ‘Geographical Zone’ runs across our basic columns 2 to 7, so we need to merge those six cells into one.

And, below that, we have three subheadings, each running across two of the original columns.

Let’s fix these first.

First, select the six cells we want to make into the ‘Geographical Zone’ heading. Then go to the menu item, Table>Merge cells, and the cells will be merged as you want. Repeat this with the three pairs just beneath.

Next, you can do similar work on the first column; leave the top cell alone, and merge the rest from two high to one cell, four times.
Now we’ve got this:

Looking promising! Only a couple of things left to fix up now, and we’ll use the same tools for each of them.

First, we want to make the cell at the top left corner go away (or appear to go away).

Before you go on, make sure that the menu item Tables>Gridlines is not checked, otherwise the gridlines might confuse you.

Now select that corner cell, then go to the menu item Format>Borders and Shading>Borders.

This brings up another palette:

You still have that corner cell selected, so select any of the settings in the first column (doesn’t matter which, we’re going to change it anyway). Then make sure that ‘Style’ is showing a full line; then make ‘Width’ into ‘2 1/4 pt’ (this a nice heavy line for the outside edges).

Then go to the ‘Preview’. The little icons round the edge are for selecting borders of the cell, so set the bottom and the right-hand ones so that they are showing your 2 1/4 point lines. Then click ‘OK’, an d you’ll get this:

Now, I’ve shown you all the tools available in Word to deal with the overall appearance of the borders; you can try fiddling with them to achieve whatever effects you need. But there’s more!

I suggest you have a look down the Table menu and see what’s there.

As well as setting up the table in the first place, there are tools to Insert, Delete and Select rows, columns or cells. There are also some fancy automatic formats, which could save you time if you like any of the options provided, like this:

And, more seriously, you can sort tables on the basis of their contents, use a formula to turn it into a ’spreadsheet lite’, and there’s a do-everything toolkit, called Table Properties.

So, there you go. You should be able to do away with your training wheels now and become a table guru; best of luck!

If you want, download this lesson.

Back to the Main Menu for these tutorials.

If you liked this, why not treat me to a coffee (or a bone for Kafka)? Thanks, mate!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS