How to Organize a Table

In a sense, you can call anything you put in a contiguous block of spreadsheet cells a table, but in Excel the term has a more specific meaning. It refers to a block of data organized so that each row refers to an item (a person in an address list, a sale in a transaction log, a product in a product catalog, and so on) and each column contains one piece of information about that item (for example, the postal code of a contact, the date of a sale, or the catalog number of a product). In addition, for a block of data to become a table, you have to designate it as such. (See "Creating a Table" below.)

Typically, the worksheet range defined as a table should have the following characteristics:

• The top row should consist of labels, with each label describing the contents of the column beneath it. Each label should be unique. (The labels row is not mandatory, but if you omit it, Excel will generate one for you using default column names.)

• Each column should contain the same kind of information.

• Each category of information you want to be able to sort by, search on, or otherwise manipulate individually should occupy a separate column.