Table Formats and Styles

Numbers offers many options for table-wide formatting that can make a table easy to read—or turn it into an abomination to behold. When it comes to avoiding the latter, I offer one important piece of advice: Practice restraint!

On a more practical, specific level, I also offer details on table-wide formats such as Formatting Text globally, Adding a Table (and Name) Outline, and Shading Alternating Rows to make your data easy to scan.

Finally, with basic formatting skills under your belt, you’ll learn to use Table Styles so you can easily apply your perfect combination of table formats to other tables whenever you want to reuse them.

Table-wide Formats

Formatting choices that affect an entire table are all stuffed into the Format Inspector’s Table pane. To apply formatting from the Table pane, you first activate or select a table (or select multiple tables).

Formatting Text

While you can format the text in individual or groups of cells, you can do it on a table-wide basis, too. And it’s the best way to start, because it will keep you from succumbing to “ransom-note” formatting—using too many fonts, sizes, and colors.

To change text formatting for an entire table, select it, go to the Format Inspector’s Text pane, and choose your options (see Tackling Text).

To proportionately enlarge or shrink all text in a table that already has more than one font size (say, larger text in the headers), you can do it in one operation, using the Format Inspector’s Table pane instead of the Text pane: with the table selected or active, click the small or large Font Size button. This is particularly useful when you Resize a Table with its resize handles, a method that resizes the table, but not its text.

This doesn’t change the font size by whole points: shrinking makes the text about 80% smaller, while enlarging makes it about 120% larger.

Adding a Table (and Name) Outline

To create a table outline, select or activate the table and go to the Format Inspector’s Table pane. In the Table Outline section, choose a style (solid, dashed, or dotted) from the pop-up menu, select a color from the Color Well, and set the line thickness by typing or clicking the arrows next to that field.

Return the outline to its default (defined in the table style) by choosing Default Table Style from the Table Outline pop-up menu; or, choose None to turn it off.

You can add the same outline around the table’s name by checking Outline Table Name. The name is framed fully (Figure 29), separated from the table by its outline border. (Also read about Naming a Table.)

Shading Alternating Rows

To make a table more readable, you can shade alternating rows to give your eyes something to follow across the table’s width. Turn shading on by checking Alternating Row Color in the Format Inspector’s Table pane, and then choosing a color from the color well. Shading doesn’t have to be subtle shades of gray; other colors can be subtle, too. (See the tip on creating subtle shades in the Colors Window.)

Table Styles

If you’ve worked with styles in a word processor—not simple italic or bold formatting, but paragraph styles that include a font and its size, line spacing, indents, tabs, and more—you already know how convenient styles are as a formatting option. Numbers offers the same one-fell-swoop convenience for formatting your tables.

A table’s style includes these table-wide formats:

• Grid line attributes (stroke, color, size)
• The color for alternating rows
• Table outline attributes (stroke, color, size)

It also includes these cell formats, which are tracked separately for cells in the body, row headers, column headers, and footers:

• Fill (background color)
• Border attributes (stroke, color, size)
• Text attributes (font, style, size)

Styles are stored in the Numbers document. When you create a template, it includes all the styles in the document.

There’s a difference between a table’s style—comprised of the items listed above—and its layout, which is its structure. The layout includes the number and size of rows and columns, and the number of headers and footers. Layout information isn’t included with the style, so the number of headers and footers, or even rows and columns, in a table that you save as a style has no effect on the style information.

Data isn’t stored with a style, either. So, while you’ll likely put text in a table in order to define the text attributes for header, footer, and body cells, the text itself isn’t saved with the style.

Working with Styles

A document’s table styles are displayed at the top of the Format Inspector’s Table pane when a table is active, or one or more tables are selected. The dots at the bottom of the style samples show how many “pages” of styles are available; look through them by clicking a dot or an arrow (the latter eventually cycles you back to where you started), or swiping while your pointer is within the Table Styles area (Figure 30).

To handle table styles, select or activate a table and work in the Table Styles area of the Table pane to:

• Apply a style: Click the sample you want.
• Create a new style: Go to the page in the Table pane that has a placeholder with a plus sign in it. Click it, and the blank is replaced with a miniature of the current table.

• Redefine a style: To redefine a style, select a table that’s formatted the way you want. You don’t have to start with a table that uses the style you want to redefine; select any table with the formatting you want to use as the redefinition. In the Table pane, Control-click the style sample you want to redefine, and choose Redefine Style from Selection. You’re given the choice to update all the tables in that document that use the style, or leave them as they are and unlink them from the style definition.
• Revert to the original style: If you’ve altered your table formats after applying a style and wish to return it to the style’s definition, Control-click on the table’s style in the Table pane and choose Clear Overrides and Apply Style from the pop-up menu.
• Delete a style: Control-click the sample in the Table pane and choose Delete Style (it doesn’t have to be the style applied to the current table). Tables formatted with that style keep the formatting they already have. but are no longer associated with a style.

Locked Tables and Redefined Styles

A locked table (read Locking and Unlocking a Table) won’t change if its style is updated, even when you choose to update all the tables in a document. But, since it “remembers” the style that was applied to it, you can manually update it. Simply unlock the table and reapply the style by clicking the sample in the Table Styles area of the Table pane.

Any manual changes you made to the table after initially applying a style remain. So, for instance, if you changed your header cells from the style’s blue to green, they will still be green. If you want everything reset to the style, instead of clicking the style sample, Control-click it and choose Clear Overrides and Apply Style.

Reorganizing Style Samples

The six style samples on the first page of the Format Inspector’s Table pane are the same choices you see when you click the Table button on the toolbar, so your most-likely-to-be-used styles should be on this first page. And the first style on that page is used for the default table that appears automatically on a new sheet, so your favorite should be in that position.

To reorganize the style samples, just click and hold a sample in the pane until it flashes and then drag it to a new position. To move it to a different page, drag it to either edge of the Inspector (you don’t have to be directly over the arrow) and hover there briefly. Although using the arrows cycles you around the sample pages when you’re looking at the styles, you’ll hit dead ends when moving samples, so you’ll have to drag your sample back the other way.