 Hi, this is Jennifer Gonzalez for Cult of Pedagogy, and today I would like to talk to you about how to feng shui your Microsoft Word tables feng shui just in case you don't know is a this the Chinese art of arranging space for better flow and Better feeling so I thought I would show you a couple of tricks that you can use to help you make them look a little better Here's a table that was created in Microsoft Word and right now. It's very crowded. There's this thick bar here A lot of the text is pushed right up against the borders of the table The first thing I would want to do to this table would be to click on this little square here To select the whole table and I'm just going to clean up the formatting So I would start by let's start by working with the font. Let's just turn all the font to something simple We can always change it later Let's make all the font the same size Let's get rid of the bold. I would do the same with the italics and I would do the same with the color I would just choose automatic color. So everything is the same color To get rid of this thick line here. I go into borders and shading I'm going to click on no border that gets rid of everything and then go back again and click on all borders And that just returns everything to nice clean lines Finally, I'm going to get rid of this shading for now go to the top of the column Select the whole column and then The shading. I'm just going to click white for now. I will be adding some color later But for right now, let's just get it all cleaned up The next thing I notice is that the call the table itself has been moved really far over. It's almost touching the edge of the page That's going to fall off in printing so I'm going to hover over the right edge of the column until I get this symbol here hold down my left key and Slide it until we're within the one inch margin The next thing that's really standing out to me and that's really bothering me are these bullets a lot of times You need to have bulleted points within a table the way that word automatically puts them in They shove them way over it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have it this far over You just don't have enough room for your text. So I'm going to go ahead and just highlight one of them. Okay If you look up here, these bars actually control where the bullets are Just for this cell if you click on the bottom Square there hold down your left key it actually slides everything over Okay, this top here is for the bullet itself and Then these two have to do with the text now We just moved the bullet over the text moved over a little but there's still a really big gap there that doesn't really need to be there So I moved that by holding this bottom square if I slide right up to that little triangle click again and Slide that's just going to move the text over just a little bit more and so what we have now is a lot more space for the text and it fits nicer inside the cell and It's not going to drag out so long. Okay. I've done that for one bullet. I've got a lot of other bullets I could go through the whole process of trying to fix those or I can use the formatting painter highlight this again and You can either go up here and click format painter Or I'll show you another way that changes your cursor to a little paintbrush if I take this cursor the way it is right now and paint over Another bulleted text. It's going to see it's going to slide right over exactly like it was So now you'll notice that the paintbrush is gone now to get it back Just go to another piece of text that has the formatting that I want Click the format painter and then I can drag it over another section and That'll fix it now an even quicker way to get that format painter instead of having to go all the way up here is To click on text that's already formatted the way you like Right-click on it and up here. You've got the format painter. So you can click on it right there drag it over here Let's see what happens if I drag both sets of bullets in this tape in this cell. Yep, they both fix So the next issue that I'm seeing is that this text is crammed up so close against these cell borders So I'm going to click my whole table again. Select the whole thing Up here what I want to look for I'm going to click on layout. I Want to click on this thing right here called cell margins and That is going to decide how much room is Above the top would be above the text bottom is below the text into the left and right how much space I Am going to just put 0.005 inches in each one See what that does all the text is still there. However, now it's got some breathing room around it We talked about color a little while ago. We've got the headers for this table. Let's go ahead and shade them I'm going to highlight just the The top row and this I believe is in the design one in the shading You just pick whatever color you like. I would recommend that you go on the lighter side You could also center Each of these titles if you like, let's go ahead and highlight all those again click on center And now they're sort of centered above each item. I'm also going to highlight this side Column here because that's another sort of a marker. I Want to keep this one the way it was though notice that we've got these Titles here along the side and they're right up against the top which is one way that you can align things It's perfectly fine, and it and it's clear to your readers but there is another option if you want it to Present itself in a different way. I'm highlighting the whole column again I'm gonna click the layout look over here. These are all different options for how you would align your text It's not just left centered and right, but it's also how it's distributed within the Cell so for example if I click this it's still left aligned, but it's centered top to bottom This one here in the middle centered in the center Left to right and top to bottom. I like that one a lot for the left hand, especially if you've got a really large Cell with a small amount of text it kind of helps this text to You know take precedence over the whole box instead of it just being slammed up into the top Probably also want these to all be capitalized. So again, we don't have to go in and do that manually We can highlight the whole thing go to home Click on this one here that tells you how you'd like to title it so we can capitalize each word and there So what if I need to add another column? What if these four are not enough? What I can do I can just be in any column or I can highlight a whole column I can go into layout and I can insert a column to the right Okay, I've got a whole new column now, and it's noticed that it's picked up the formatting from the one on the left It's even got bullets here. I can also undo that and I can Insert to the left if I want to same deal. Here's the thing notice that it now has shoved this over to the right so See that little fuzzy box right there This is going to actually grab the side of that column and scoot it over All right now I've got too much table for my document So I'm going to slide this over here Just a bit because I'm going to show you a really cool trick Let's move these over just a bit so that we've got them All right I want to show you this right here called distribute columns What this does is it makes all the columns you select equal length to each other So I'm going to do this twice actually I'm going to select I'm holding down my left key and selecting all the way across And I'm going to click distribute columns Make some all even I'm still a little bit off to the mark into the margin though So I'm going to slide this over one more time And then I'm going to distribute columns one more time There there's also a distribute rows that you can do the same thing on the sides Um the documents I work with we I don't end up using that very much, but that is there Let's take a look at these right here notice. It's a it's a small amount of words It's a really really long column highlight the whole thing And we've got something called text direction here you click on that and it turns it to Up and down sort of uh running up the side if you keep clicking it it goes in different directions So look at that now it's going up the top so what I can do Is I can take this column now And I can make it much thinner And still have the information there then I can take my columns again Distribute them and they've got more space Let's take these and put them up real high up on there And I'm not sure this has been forced to be in its direction So you can actually grab that slide it up there we go You can make these position in the center to highlight them all I'm gonna just click that that's still set up for um the vertical okay So I hope that learning about some of these tools will help you to improve the look of your tables in Microsoft Word Obviously, there's a lot of other tools up here that I haven't gotten into but by learning a few Sometimes you can experiment with others once you start understanding how everything works So thanks for listening. Have a great day