Draw your tables
 It's absurdly easy to build a table in Word 97. Just right-click a blank area in your document, select Draw Table from the shortcut menu, and use the freehand tools in the Tables and Borders dialog box to create outlines, cells, and borders. Once you've picked a border style from the drop-down box, you can draw the outline of the table, then use the same line style or choose a different one to draw the rows and columns. There are tools that enable you to assign colors to borders and cells in the table. You can even tidy up your freehand drawing by making rows and columns a uniform size. When you have data in the table, right-click and select Draw Table again for some data-manipulation tools, such as sorting, summing the contents of columns, and aligning text.
Set tables with ease
Aligning whole tables in Word used to require many ugly work-arounds. Now it's easy. Just use the regular toolbar buttons for formatting whole tables. To center the text in a table, for example, select the entire table, and click the toolbar's centered-text button.
Built-in version control with Paste Special
Don't settle for plain old pasting your Excel tables into your Word and PowerPoint documents--paste them "special" instead. Using the Paste Special command means that every time the data changes in Excel, the Word/PowerPoint document will be updated automatically--no more manually updating your documents or showing up to a crucial meeting with an old copy of that key document.
To paste a table that will automatically reflect changes made in Excel, use Edit/Copy to copy the table (or portion of the table) from Excel. Then, in Word or PowerPoint, choose Edit/Paste Special (not Edit/Paste or Edit/Paste Cells.) From the dialog box that appears, select "Microsoft Excel worksheet object," and click the Paste Link option. A picture of the Excel table will be inserted into your Word/PowerPoint File, and any changes in the Excel source file will be automatically noted in the new file as soon as the changes are saved in Excel, even if the Word/PowerPoint file is closed at the time.
Organize with Tables
One of the best ways to organize information on a Web page is to use tables. When you use Word as your HTML editor, you can take advantage of the familiar Table tools to create and format tables for your page.
To create a table, either click the Tables And Borders button or select Table/Draw Table. You'll see the Tables And Borders toolbar. As you would in any Word document, use your mouse to click and drag the outline for the table. Once you've created the outside border, click and drag the edges to create horizontal and vertical lines to create the table cells. If you've already saved the file as an HTML document, the Table menu includes Table Properties and Cell Properties options that allow you to adjust alignment, background colors, and cell colors. You can also get these options by right-clicking anywhere within the table.
How to Align a Table
A good rule to always remember whether you are in tables or just regular text is if you have something that is already typed and you want to change the alignment, Word always requires that you select the text or table before you can change the alignment. In tables you must select the entire table before you can change the alignment. If only part of the table is selected only that part will have the alignment changed. So always remember to select the entire table by clicking on <Table/Select Table> or using the keystrokes <Ctrl+5> (the 5 must be the 5 on the numeric keyboard.) Now you can change the alignment by clicking on the alignment button on the Formatting toolbar.
What To Do When Your Table Runs Off the Edge
Many times I have had a call from a user who has created a table and then find that it has extended past the side of the page. It seems impossible to get to the rest of the table. When you create a table, it by default extends the table the width of the page from one margin to the other margin with the column widths being of equal size. But when a column is added to the page, Word extends the column off of the page. Then you begin to panic--you can't get to the column! To get the column(s) back onto the page, select the entire table by clicking on <Table/Select Table> or using the keystrokes <Ctrl+5> (the 5 must be the 5 on the numeric keyboard.) Now click on <Table/Cell Height and Width>. Make sure that the Column tab is selected. Most likely you will already be in the column settings and the width of column will be highlighted. All you have to do now is type in the word auto or click on the button that says <Autofit>. Now your table will fit within the margins on the page. If you need for the columns to be of different sizes, you can change them now, but be sure that you don't run into the same problem again by doing it gradually.
I've Created a Table but Decided I Would Rather have it as Text
We are all human and subject to change our minds. After you have typed that table, you decide you would rather have it as text instead. There's no need to retype it or cut and paste it. All you have to do it select the entire table and then click on <Table/Convert Table to Text>. When you do this, a Convert Table to Text dialog box will appear. Make the appropriate selection for what you want the separation character to be and click on <OK>. Now your table will be converted to text.
I want the Text that I Created to be in a Table
When you have text to be converted to a table, always make sure that you have separated the columns with paragraph marks, tabs, commas, etc. and be sure to be consistent with the same character. To convert the text, select the text that you want converted and click on <Table/Convert Text to Table>. Isn't it amazing?!? Word automatically knows it is converting text to table and not table to text! A dialog box will appear that allows you to set the number of columns, width and autoformat. Now your text will be in table format.
If you would like to do this faster and you do not need to worry about autoformat, click on the Insert Table button on the Standard Toolbar. Viola! It is automatically converted to a table.
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