Section 52. Insert a Table

52. Insert a Table

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

6 About Proper HTML Coding

SEE ALSO

35 Add a Table

48 Use the HTML Views

Inserting a table into your page is easy to do at any time, but if you plan ahead you can divide your work into two portions: design, where you think about how the page is going to look, and production, where you simply add content to the page.

Getting your existing content into a table is very easy, but you need to divide your content up into the units that you want to put in different places on the page. Effectively separating information is a skill you are going to use over and over to make your pages more informative and easy for the viewer to read.

1.	Open a New Page in Composer In this task, you are going to start with a new page and work with a table to design the page, and then you are going to copy the content from the existing page you have been working on.
2.	Click on the Table Icon This brings up the Insert Table dialog box. For every table, you must know how many columns and rows to have, how wide to make the table, and whether there is a border. There are other attributes of a table that you are going to use, but these are the ones that you have to do on every table. The default table in Composer is set to produce two rows and two columns and to be 100% of the width of the element containing it, which is the page in this case. If you are inserting a table into another table cellnesting the tablethen that width is the width of the cell that contains the new table. 52. Insert a Table
3.	Set the Rows and Columns Values I will set the rows to 3 and the columns to 2 and click OK. This inserts the table into the page where you can begin to edit it.
4.	Copy and Paste Your Data into the Table Open any page you have been working on, if you have content available. In my examples, I copy and paste the headline into the upper-left cell of the table. I also copy and paste the bulleted list into the bottom-left cell of the table. I even copy and paste the remaining text into the lower-right cell of the table. Tables are very flexible and can contain all kinds of content. TIP HTML doesn't normally have ways to control format of a web page. To compensate for few native controls, web designers create page layout control with tables. You will use many tables as you design your pages. Experiment! When you paste each item, the table resizes to accept that item. When you have content in only one cell in the first column, the second column might resize down to its smallest size to give as much room as possible for the content of the first column. If you insert content into an opposing cell, the table will balance itself. In my example, I click in the small, lower-right cell and paste, and the table resizes again to make both columns fit as best they can. TIP When you copy and paste text, the styles might not follow from the original document. This is because the text styles, like the font styles, are carried in tags that wrap the format around the text. When you select items in the Normal view, you can easily select the contents of the tag, but in some cases you won't be able to select the formatting tags along with the content they contain. You need to be sure to check that what you paste matches what you copy, and be ready to reformat the text if necessary.
5.	Save the New Page You Just Created Any work you do is important, so save it after any major change.