Section 55. Edit a Table | Sams Teach Yourself Creating Web Pages All in One

55. Edit a Table

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

6 About Proper HTML Coding

SEE ALSO

35 Add a Table

48 Use the HTML Views

52 Insert a Table

53 Customize Your Table for Effective Page Layout

54 Add Style to Your Table

Working with tables can be a little like building shelves for your books and realizing that you did the math wrong and ended up with more shelves than books. In a web page, though, this is easy to fix because you can rearrange the table by adding and subtracting and collapsing cells to make the table just right for the information.

55. Edit a Table

1.	Click on the HTML Tags View Note that there are now tags on the page that constitute the table. The outermost <table> tag is just inside the <body> tag and represents the boundary of the table. Inside the table there are <td> tags for each cell . There is one <th> for the first cell, which indicates that it is a table headera specialized sort of table cell that Composer adds by default.
2.	Add a New Row of Cells Click on the last <p> tag in the lower-right cell and press the Tab key. Maybe you're starting with a truly empty table. Place a <p> and </p> pairing in a cell. When you press the tab at the end of a table rather than adding a space in the line, a new row of cells is added to the bottom of the table. This is the quickest way to add cells to a table and makes it easy to create a table that might be too small to start and then add as you need to every time that you get to the bottom of the table.
3.	Add a Column to the Table Click in an empty cell of the table. Right-click and select Column Before from Table Insert on the context menu. A new column is added to the table before the cell you selected. Notice that the cell at the top that you have merged into one cell is not affected by your adding a new column.
4.	Delete a Column Click in the new column you just added, and then right-click and select Column(s) from Table Delete on the context menu. The column you just added has been deleted. You can delete columns , rows, cells, the entire table, and the contents of cells at one time.
5.	Set the Table Border to 0 Click anywhere in the table, and then right-click and select Table Cell Properties on the context menu. From the Table tab, set the border to 0 and click OK. This will cause the cell border to disappear, preserving your page layout without distracting lines. Now that you have an idea of how tables work, you can hide the table border and start using tables as a layout tool. You'll notice that there is now a red border around the table cells. This is just a visual cue for you to know where the borders of the table cells are, but it won't show up on the page when you view it in the browser.