This post is the first in a series of articles designed to help small business owners create more eye catching documents in Microsoft Word, quickly and easily.
Tables are one of the most important methods for communicating related information in Microsoft Word 2007. While it’s fairly simple to add a table within the application, adding a bit of style can be a bit for tricky. The build in table styles don’t help all that much either (and they’re not that attractive either), so I suggest you steer clear of them.
All it takes is a few simple steps to turn a default, black-border-line table into something a lot more appealing for your intended audience.
Take a look at the table below. It’s a 6 column table that spanned my entire page in MS Word. The default text size is 12points, which is almost always too large for text within a table.
Let’s start by selecting the entire table by clicking the 
icon while hovering your mouse over the table. With the table selected, adjust the text size to 9 points, followed by some slight tweaks of the columns to give us better spacing. The result of the tweak is below:
Next, select the top row of the table (position the mouse slightly left of the row and click to select the entire row) and using the paint bucket, select a light grey shade to highlight our header row. Follow it up by making the header text bold. You can choose a different colour besides grey, but since other readers of your document may end up printing a copy, what looks nice on the screen doesn’t always translate well to the printer. If you’re using colour, be sure to test that it looks good when printed.
The final step and most important step: get rid of those vertical lines! I know it’s a hard habit to break but trust me, your documents will look far more polished and presentable without those darn vertical distractions!
Click the icon with your right mouse button and then select borders and shading from the menu. Then do this:
Click setting option to “none” remove the existing border styles- Set the colour to a dark grey (not too dark though)
- Leave the width at 1/2
- Select the top, middle and bottom options to turn on borders for the TOP, MIDDLE and BOTTOM lines of the table.
One final option is that you may want to put a box around the table. Sometimes I write documents with the border, sometimes without; although most days I prefer table designs WITHOUT the border. It’s more about personal preference than anything.
There you have it: A few simple steps that will add a touch of class and professionalism to the data you wish to present, but without the effort!
