Hi. This is Jennifer Gonzalez for Cult of Pedagogy.
And today I would like to talk to you about how to "Feng Shui" your
Microsoft Word tables.
Feng Shui, just in case you don't know,
is the Chinese art of arranging space for better flow and
better feeling. So I thought I would show you a couple of tricks
you can use to help you make them look a little better.
Here's a table that was created in Microsoft Word.
And right now it's very crowded. There's this
thick bar here, a lot of the text is pushed right up against
the borders of the table.
The first thing I would want to do to this table would be to
click on this little square here to select the whole table.
And I'm just gonna clean up the formatting. So I would start by,
let's start by working with the font.
Let's just turn all the font to something simple. We can always change it later.
Let's make all the font the same size.
Let's get rid of the bold. I would do the same with the italics.
And I would do the same with the color; I would just choose automatic color so
everything is the same color. To get rid of this thick line here,
I'd go into Borders and Shading,
I'm going to click on "no border," and it gets rid of everything,
and then go back again and click on "all borders," and that just returns everything
to nice clean lines.
Finally, I'm going to get rid of this shading for now. Go to the top of the column,
select the whole column, and then
the shading...I'm just gonna click white for now.
I will be adding some color later, but for right now, let's just get it all cleaned up.
The next thing I notice is that the table itself has been moved
really far over; its almost touching the edge of the page.
That's going to fall off in printing.
So I'm going to hover over the right edge of the column until I get this symbol here,
hold down my left key, and
slide it until we're within the one-inch margins.
The next thing that's really standing out to me and that's really bothering me
are these bullets. A lot of times you need to have
bulleted points within a table. The way that Word automatically puts them in,
they shove them way over, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to
have it this far over, you just don't have enough room for your text.
So I'm gonna go ahead and just highlight one of them
okay, if you look up here these bars actually control
where the bullets are just for this cell.
If you click on the bottom...
...square there, hold down your...
left key...it actually slides
everything over.
This top here is for the bullet itself, and then these two
have to do with the text. Now we just moved the bullet over,
the text moved over a little, but there's still a really big gap there that
doesn't really need to be there.
So I moved that by holding this bottom square...
if I slide right up to that little triangle, click again,
and slide, that's just going to move the text over
just a little bit more. And so what we have now is a lot more space for the text,
and it fits nicer inside the cell,
and it's not gonna drag out so long.
Okay. I've done that for one bullet. I've got a lot of other bullets. I could go through
the whole process of trying to fix those,
or I can use the formatting painter. I highlight this again,
and you can either go up here
and click Format Painter, or I'll show you another way (later).
That changes your cursor to a little paintbrush. If I take
this cursor the way it is right now and
paint over another bulleted text,
it's going to -- see -- it's going to slide right over, exactly like it was.
So now you'll notice that the paint brush is gone.
Now to get it back, just go to another piece of text that has the formatting that I want,
click the Format Painter,
and then I can drag it over another section, and that'll fix it.
Now an even quicker way to get that Format Painter,
instead of having to go all the way up here,
is to click on text that's already formatted the way you like,
right click on it, and up here
you've got the Format Painter. So you can click on it right there
Drag it over here...
Let's see what happens if I drag
both sets of bullets in this cell...
Yep, they both fix.
So the next issue that I'm seeing is that this text is crammed up
so close against these cell borders.
So I'm going to click my whole table again, select the whole thing.
Up here, what I want to look for
I'm going to click on Layout. I want to click on this thing right here called Cell Margins.
And that is going to decide how much room is
above -- the top would be above the text, bottom is below the text,
and to the left and right -- how much space.
I'm going to just put .005 inches in each one...
...see what that does. All the text is still there, however,
now it's got some breathing room around it.
We talked about color a little while ago. We've got the headers for this table,
let's go ahead and shade them,
I'm going to highlight just the the top row,
and this I believe is in the Design one, in Shading...
just pick whatever color you like. I would recommend that you go on the lighter side.
You could also center each of these titles if you like.
Let's go ahead and highlight all those again, click on "center," and now they're
centered above each item. I'm also going to highlight this
side column here because that's another sort of a "marker,"
I want to keep this one the way it was, though.
Notice that we've got these titles here, along the side,
and they're right up against the top, which is one way that you can align things,
it's perfectly fine, and it's clear to your readers,
but there is another option if you want it to
present itself in a different way. I'm highlighting the whole column again,
click Layout. Look over here: These are all different options for how you would
align your text. It's not just left, centered, and right, but it's also how it's
distributed within the cell.
So for example, if I click this, it's still left-aligned,
but it's centered top to bottom.
This one here in the middle -- centered in the center--
left to right, and top to bottom, I like that one a lot for the left-hand,
especially if you've got a really large
cell with a small amount of text. It kind of helps this text to,
you know, "take precedence" over the whole box instead of it just being
slammed up into the top.
Probably also want this all to be capitalized. So again, we don't have to go
in and do that manually, we can highlight the whole thing,
go to Home, click on this one here that tells you how
you'd like to title it, so we can capitalize each word in there.
So what if I need to add another column,
what if these four are not enough?
What I can do, I can just be in any column or I can highlight a whole column,
I can go into Layout, and I can insert a column to the right.
Okay, I've got a whole new column now. Notice that it's
picked up the formatting from the one on the left, it's even got bullets here.
I can also undo that and I can
insert to the left if I want to, same deal.
Here's the thing: Notice that it now has shoved this over to the right.
So...see that little fuzzy box right there?
This is going to actually grab the side of that column and scoot it over.
All right. Now I've got too much table
for my document, so I'm going to slide...
this over here just a bit, because I'm gonna show you are really cool trick.
Just move these over just a bit so that we've got them...
All right. I want to show you this right here called Distribute Columns.
What this does is it makes all the columns you select
equal lengths to each other. So I'm going to do this twice actually
I'm going to select...holding down my left key and selecting all the way across...
click Distribute Columns, makes them all even. I'm still a little bit off to the...
into the margin, so I'm going to slide this over one more time...
and then I'm going to distribute columns one more time...
there. There's also a Distribute Rows that you can do the same thing on the sides...
...the documents I work with, I don't end up using that very much, but that is there.
Let's take a look at these right here. Notice it's a small amount of words
it's a really really long column,
Highlight the whole thing, we've got something called Text Direction here...
click on that, and it turns it to...
up and down, sort of running up the side. You keep clicking it,
it goes in different directions. So look at that now; it's going up the top so
what I can do, is I can take this column now,
and I can make it much thinner, and still have the information there.
Then I can take my columns again,
distribute them, and they've got more space.
It's taken these and put them up real high up on there and I'm not sure...
this has been forced to be... So you can actually grab that
slide it up...there we go. You can make these positioned in the center too:
highlight them all...
just click that -- that's still set up for the vertical...okay.
So I hope that learning about some of these tools will help you to
improve the look of your tables in Microsoft Word.
Obviously there's a lot of other tools up here that I haven't gotten into
but by learning a few, sometimes you can experiment with others
once you start understanding how everything works.
So thanks for listening...Have a great day.