Working with Tables

OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide

Chapter 9: Working with Tables

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• Creating a table
• Formatting the table layout
• Resizing and positioning the table
• Resizing, positioning, and inserting rows and columns
• Merging and splitting cells
• Borders, backgrounds, and boundaries
• Formatting the table text
• Data entry and manipulation in tables
• Additional table operations
• Table menu and toolbar

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Template:Documentation/HelpNeeded This is Chapter 9 of the OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide, produced by the OOoAuthors group. A PDF of this chapter is available from this wiki page. The PDFs are up to date for the second edition of the book, but not all of the wiki pages for this chapter have been updated yet.

Introduction

Tables are a useful way to organize and present large amounts of information, for example:

• Technical, financial, or statistical reports
• Product catalogs showing descriptions, prices, characteristics, and photographs of products
• Bills or invoices
• Lists of names with address, age, profession, and other information

Tables can often be used as an alternative to spreadsheets to organize materials. A well-designed table can help readers understand better what you are saying. While you would normally use tables for text or numbers, you could put other objects, such as pictures, in cells.

Tables can also be used as a page-layout tool to position text in areas of a document instead of using several Tab characters. For example, the descriptions under Figure 13 (in the PDF version of this chapter) were created in a table with invisible borders. Another, perhaps better example would be in headers and footers to support independent positioning of different elements, such as page number, document title etc. This use of tables is described in Chapter 4 (Formatting Pages).