Using FrontPage Tables

All good sites start with a table!

This is not strictly true! But tables do offer a basic and easy way to lay out your page design.

Building a usable website requires consistency. A good way to achieve this is with tables. The purists would throw their arms up in the air and spout CSS! Tables for now offer the novice a lot more controllability and if you have just started with Front Page, you won't want to be learning yet more! And besides, as much as i love CSS, i think for now there are many issues still to be worked out such as how different browsers respond to HTML and CSS which at the time of writing has yet to be standardized.

Tables react differently to different situations see some examples here.

Tables can be stacked one on top of the other or nested, tables inside of tables. If you concentrate on your HTML then all browsers should pretty much display your page as intended.

About tables

A table is made up of rows and columns of cells into which you can insert text and graphics.
You can customize your tables in a variety of ways to make them more attractive and easy to read.

Click in the table/cell that you want to customize and right click, from the pop-up short cut menu you can choose table or cell properties.

Work with rows and columns

You can create more cells in your table by splitting one cell into two or more cells. You can also merge adjacent cells into one cell.

Once you have all the rows and columns you need in your table, you can set the row heights and column widths the way you want them. Seldom will you need to set the height!

You can define the row heights and column widths to be a percentage of the overall table size, a specific size in pixels or set all rows and columns to be spaced uniformly.

Example - Consider a 1row 2 column wide table. You could have a left hand cell set to 25% If the table is set to 100% The right cell area would be 75% This would be the case in all browser windows so potentially your content could move around!

Copy and paste content

You can copy content from one cell to cells in adjacent rows or columns in your table without having to cut and paste each time. For example, to copy the contents of a cell in the first row of a table, you can select that cell and drag across all the adjacent cells in the same row and then click a Fill command.

Control text and table layout

You can control how your table appears on the page by setting the table alignment — tables can be aligned to the left, right, or centre of the page. The following table is centred on the Web page.

This table is 400pixels wide and centred on the screen. Borders are on and the cells coloured.
Table	Table
Table	Table

You can also control the height and width of the table by entering pixel and percentage values. For example, you can set the width of the table to 80 percent of the overall page width (or frame width, if the table is in a frame). If a site visitor resizes the browser window, the page size and table change accordingly. On pages that include a table and text, you can also specify whether you want text to flow around the sides of the table.

By specifying the way text appears inside each cell, you can control how much space there is between the border and text of a cell, and you can set the horizontal and vertical alignment of text. In addition, table text can be formatted like any other text — you can change the font style, size, color, and other attributes.

Set border specifications

You can customize the way borders appear in your tables. For example, you could change the thickness of the outer border of a table, set the border color for the whole table, or set a different border color for individual cells. You can choose one color for the border or, if you prefer a three-dimensional look, you can choose two colors a light color and a dark color.

This table style was created in table properties and uses the light/dark border.

Each cell has been styled using the light and dark border options in cell properties.

Choose backgrounds

You can choose background colors and pictures for your tables. Background colors can be used to shade specific columns or rows to add emphasis. You can use background pictures to add visual appeal to your tables.

You can set background colors and pictures for certain cells, or you can set them for the whole table.

Table Background

Text can go here	This is a camera!

Cell Background

Create captions and headers

You can add a caption above a table as a title, or below a table to summarize its content for site visitors. You can also format the caption text.

To emphasize certain cells in your table, you can specify them as table headers. For example, in the table below, the first row and first column contain labels. They are formatted as table headers so that they stand out from the rest of the table. By default, a table header is formatted as bold text. However, you can modify the table header style and define additional properties for your table headers, such as shading.

This is a table caption
This is a table header	This is a table header	This is a table header	This is a table header	This is a table header
This is a table header	test	test	test	test
This is a table header	test	test	test	test
This is a table header	test	test	test	test

Note You can also create visually-structured Web pages by adding a layout table from a list of pre designed layouts in the Layout Tables and Cells task pane, or you can draw a layout to meet your customized needs.

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