Tables: Formatting

Besides formatting text inside a table, there's various ways to format tables themselves:

• Table cell alignment
• Table borders
• Table shading
• Remove paragraph spacing in a table
• Bullet/Number lists in tables

Table cell alignment

Align content vertically and horizontally in the table cell via Table Layout > Alignment:

Table borders

You can choose whether to have table borders visible or not via options in Table Design > Borders drop down. The example below shows how these options work on a table that's been fully selected (hover over and click top left square):

Table shading

You can colour the background of cell with the Shading colour palette via Table Design > Shading:

The example above is applying shading to a whole table but you might want to apply shading to just the header row like this:

Remove paragraph spacing in a table

If you're coping a table from other Word document, Excel or a web browser it can come across with unwanted paragraph spacing. To remove this go to the Home > Paragraph options (bottom right corner button) and remove spacing 'points' as needed. Typically it's spacing after that needs reducing. Take a look:

Bullet/Number lists in tables

You might find when applying a bullet list or number list to a table that the default indent Word applies isn't ideal in such a contrained space, see a quick fix here involving indent markers on the horizontal ruler: Table lists and indents.