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Now that you've been through many of these table features on your own—from creating tables to editing, resizing, and formatting them—you can work on some of the finer points of table management. The Table Properties dialog box enables you to make choices about how you want your table to behave—with text in a document and in a browser window on the Web. To display the Table Properties dialog box, click in the table and then choose Table, Table Properties (see Figure 18-15).
Figure 18-15. The Table Properties dialog box enables you to make sizing and behavior choices for your tables.
In the Table Properties dialog box, the Size options in each of the tabs—Table, Row, Column, and Cell—include the choices you need to set the preferred width or height measurements for each item.
Note
The way in which your text aligns with the table you create is controlled on the Table tab in the Table Properties dialog box. You can choose Left, Center, and Right alignment, which act as follows:
Another option in the Alignment section of the Table tab in the Table Properties dialog box enables you to indent the table from the left margin by a specific increment. The default is set to 0 inch, and you can increase that setting as needed.
The Cell tab in the Table Properties dialog box also includes an alignment setting that controls the vertical alignment of data in table cells. This setting enables you to choose the alignment of text within the cell, and it's related to the choices you can make on the Tables And Borders toolbar when you select the Align button.
Text wrap becomes a very important consideration when you're working with multiple tables in a long document. On the Table tab in the Table Properties dialog box, you have the option of choosing None, which means text doesn't wrap around text at all but appears above and below it, or Around, which flows text up to and around the table.
When you click Around, the Positioning button becomes available. Click Positioning to make choices that control where the table is positioned in your document by default. (See Figure 18-16.)
Figure 18-16. The Table Positioning dialog box enables you to control the default table position for your document.
These choices include the following:
Tip
Two options on the Row tab of the Table Properties dialog box control the way in which the table is divided in the event of a section or page break. If you want to allow Word to break the table at a specified point in the table, click the Next Row or Previous Row button to select the row after which you would allow a break. Then select the Allow Row To Break Across Pages check box (see Figure 18-17).
If you want to repeat the column headings in the second section of the divided table, select the Repeat As Header Row At The Top Of Each Page check box. This will cause your table heads to be replicated at the beginning of the next table segment.
Figure 18-17. Choose whether you want to allow a table to be divided by a page or section break on the Row tab in the Table Properties dialog box.