26. Manage a Table  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 24 Create a Table 25 Format a Table
 SEE ALSO 29 Add a Chart or Spreadsheet to a Document
Once you're familiar with creating tables and formatting them, you'll still find yourself adjusting them as you work with them. Perhaps you need to add more rows or columns . Perhaps you want to make a quick adjustment to one of the column widths. Formatting a table and getting data into it is most of the battle, but you also will find that traversing a table differs somewhat from traversing regular text. Table 4.1 shows the keystrokes needed to traverse tables efficiently . Table 4.1. Writer's Table-Navigating Keystrokes | Press This | To Move the Table's Cursor Here | | Shift+Tab or left arrow | The preceding cell | | Tab or right arrow | The next cell | | Up arrow | The cell above the current cell | | Down arrow | The cell below the current cell | | Ctrl+Home | The first cell in the table | | Ctrl+End | The last cell in the table | | Enter | Pressing Enter in any cell adds a paragraph return within the cell |
 TIP You can insert a table into an existing table cell. This arrangement is known as a nested table and is useful when you have complex information to track. Suppose that you're creating a table of monthly sales and want to insert two cells within the December cell to include both pre-Christmas and post-Christmas sales. To insert a nested table, click in the cell and then select Table, Insert, Table .
| 1. | Resize the Column Adjusting a column's size is extremely simple. Move your mouse pointer to the edge of the column you want to resize. The mouse pointer changes to a double arrow. Click the edge of the column and drag left or right to adjust the width of the column. When you release the mouse, Writer resizes the column. If you shrink a column's width too narrow, the text may not all fit on one line, and Writer will be forced to double the height of the rows to hold the extra data. 26. Manage a Table  NOTE You can make a column width adjustment by dragging a column's edge on the horizontal ruler atop the document. | | 2. | Delete a Column Select a column you want to delete by right-clicking it. From the submenu that appears, select Column, Delete . Writer deletes the column and increases the width of the column to the right to maintain the size of the table. If you don't like the wide column that results, drag its edges to adjust its width. TIP You can change the direction of text flow in a table cell so that the text runs vertically instead of horizontally. To do so, click within the cell, choose Table, Table Properties from the menu bar, and then click the Text direction list arrow in the Text Flow tab. | | 3. | Delete a Row
Deleting a row is similar to deleting a column: Right-click in the row you want to delete. From the submenu that appears, select Row, Delete . The rows below the deleted column move up to take its place.
| | 4. | Insert a Column Right-click in any cell in a column to insert a column to the right or left of it, and then click Insert from the Column submenu to open the Insert Columns dialog box. Click Before if you want to insert the column in front of (to the left of) the selected column; click After if you want the new column to appear after (to the right of) the selected column. You can insert more than one column by adjusting the Amount value. When you click OK , the new column appears in your table. Now you can fill the new column with data and adjust any column or table widths as necessary. TIP If you want to insert a new row instead of a new column, select Row, Insert from the right-click menu. | | 5. | Adjust the Row Height
You can adjust the height of an individual row by dragging the bottom edge of the row or by using the Row Height dialog box. The dialog box is your best choice if you want to set the row height precisely or if you want to adjust the height of more than one row at a time.
To adjust one or more rows, select the row or rows you want to adjust and then right-click the selection. Choose Row, Height from the menu to display the Row Height dialog box. Adjust the Height value. If you click the Fit to Size option, the row adjusts to match the height of the row's data. If, for example, the row contains text in a large font, the Fit to Size option adjusts the row height to accommodate that larger font as well.
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