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Helen Bradley - MS Office Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

I'm a lifestyle journalist and I've been writing about office productivity software for a long time. Here you'll find handy hints, tips, tricks, techniques and tutorials on using software as diverse as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access and Publisher from Microsoft and other applications that I love. My publishing credits include PC Magazine, Windows XP mag, CNet, PC User mag, SmallbusinessComputing.com, Winplanet and Sydney Morning Herald.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Fix the Headings in your Excel 2007 tables


Excel 2007 has some great tools for working with and formatting tables (previously called Lists in earlier versions). To create a table, select the range that contains the table data and from the Home tab select Format As Table. Select a table format style and, when prompted to, confirm that the selected area contains all the data for your table, whether or not your table has headers and click Ok. When you do this you will see that each heading cell displays a dropdown arrow to the right of its contents.

Unfortunately, if your headers are right aligned, the table headings will run into the arrows and be partially hidden. I don't know why Microsoft doesn't create a fix for this because it looks awful. To avoid this happening, select the heading cells, right click and choose Format Cells. Click the Custom setting and type @ and four spaces and click Ok. This should add sufficient spaces to the right of a heading to move the headings a little to the left so the headings can be seen clearly. Now it all looks much nicer as you see above.

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