Greg Umbers
Have you ever struggled vertically lining up entries in a Word Processor document? Does thinking about columns lead to visions of army regiments and long cues to Rolling Stones concerts? Fear not, a solution is at hand…
How do you place text or numbers into columns?
For many of us we instinctively reach for the spacebar and pad out each item so that they line up into columns. Why is this a bad idea?
For starters, it’s laborious and time consuming. What if we want to move a column along a bit, or change the spacing between columns? That’s a lot of deleting and inserting spaces.
In the old days, using spaces or a single fixed tab on a (non-electronic) type writer did not present problems, because:
a) You did not have any other choice
b) All characters had the same width
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Nowadays there exists a myriad of fonts, and only certain ones will come installed with a particular operating system. Somebody else reading your document on another computer will not necessarily have the same font that the document was written in. Their software will substitute the font for the nearest matching font on their computer, but this new font may have a different character width which will result in a lot of crooked columns.
Using Tabs
In word processor applications, the tab key typically moves the cursor to the next tab stop. Tab stops can be set for a selected number of rows or a whole document. Besides the default left aligning tab stops, you can also set them to be centre aligning and right aligning, the latter being appropriate for arranging a column of numbers, for example. You can even set a decimal centred tab stop for numbers that have differing amounts of decimal points.
While this is a significant advance on using spaces for alignment, and columns can be moved or spaced apart by simply moving tab stops, using columns has advantages…
Columns
Formatting a word processing page into columns has the benefit of automatically having the number, width and interspacing of columns already set up. Furthermore, text that spills over a column will automatically wrap to the next line within the column. However, in most word processor programs it is difficult to align entries in different columns on the same page. Therefore consider using…
Tables
Apart from being able to very easily change column widths and row heights, have text automatically wrap within a cell of the table, horizontally align columns and vertically align rows, and align entries in different columns, you can also move rows up or down in your table, sort them, keep a row as a heading row at the top of each page, and format the borders and background colours in a table.
Each row and column intersection is called a cell. You can change the alignment and padding (internal spacing) of individual cells as well as for columns, rows, and in fact whole tables. The two kinds of lines you will see around the cells of tables are:
a) Borders, which are seen when you print the document. You can change the border, thickness, colour and style, and you can delete or hide them.
b) Gridlines – these show you where your margins are. They don’t print, but show you where the rows, columns and whole table are, so you know where to type your text
Whichever method you use, only use the spacebar to separate words like computer and literate!
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