Last month, we covered the basics of creating PowerPoint tables, including building them from scratch, importing them from other Office programs, and rearranging the text boxes and boundaries. This month, we take your chart further by crafting its look to fit exactly the message you want to convey.

Change The Look

You can quickly change a table’s color scheme by clicking one of the available Table Styles displayed on the Design tab under the Table Tools tab. (Remember that the Table Tools tab appears only after you click a table to select it.) Rest the mouse pointer over a style to see an instant preview of how the look affects your table. You’ll find a wide variety. Scrolling through the styles in the small window on the tab can get tedious, but you can see all of your choices at once by clicking the bottom arrow beside the styles. If you discover a style you like so much you want to use it for all the new tables you create, right-click the style and choose Set As Default.

To the left of the Table Styles, you'll find the Table Style Options section, which includes several checkboxes to help you further modify the look of the style you choose. Click Header Row, for example, and you’ll see the top row of your chart become shaded or bold, depending on the style you’re using. You’ll also notice in the little preview images in Table Styles that many of them suddenly display highlighted header rows, too. In the same way, you can experiment with other settings such as Total Row and Banded Columns to see how they work.

Change The Layout

On the other Table Tools tab, called Layout, things start feeling a little more like the intimidating old tables that may have scared you off in the past. The buttons here look pretty techy, but with a bit of study, you’ll see that the tools are fairly intuitive controls for things such as the number and arrangement of rows and columns and the text within them.

Expanding your table is simple if you just need more rows at the bottom. Click in the bottom-right cell and press TAB. PowerPoint automatically inserts an extra row at the bottom. If you want to add rows or columns in the middle of the table, you’ll need to use the Layout tab’s buttons. Click a cell near where you want the new row or column and then use the appropriate buttons on the left side of the Layout tab. Their labels tell you whether they’ll insert a new row above or below your cursor or insert a new column to the left or right of the cursor. You can remove the row or column your cursor is in by clicking the tab’s Delete button.

You can combine cells by highlighting several of them and clicking the Merge Cells button. This works for both horizontal and vertical groupings of cells. If you decide later that the cells were better off in their separate form, highlight the merged cell, click the Split Cells button and indicate the number of rows or columns you’re splitting it across. You may remember from last month’s Quick Study that you also can remove cell borders with the Design tab’s eraser tool.

Use the tools in the Alignment section to arrange your text properly. Here you’ll find the familiar left, right, and center alignment buttons, as well as buttons for centering text vertically. The Text Direction button lets you choose vertical text when that fits your table’s design.