This week, I have been sharing information to help you polish the content and design of your Analysis project. Today, I am continuing that theme with my #FridayFact: Tables can be boring. If you do not work on document design, tables are often a visual jumble of words and numbers. Same goes for spreadsheets, but we won’t talk about them in this course.

Back to tables, with so much information jammed into columns and rows, the information can become hard to read. If it’s hard to differentiate between the rows of information, readers can easily lose track of where they are in a table. When the column headings scroll out of view, readers may not recall the information every column contains.

To help you solve the challenge of boring tables, I have these articles you can read and apply to your Analysis project:

• 10 Easy Ways to Turn a Dull Word Table into a Design Element
• 8 Formatting Tips for Perfect Tables in Microsoft Word

There are a lot of ads on these pages. I use a browser extension that hides all the ads. I never see them at all. If the ads bother you, you might try one of the blockers too. I’m using Adblock in the Chrome browser.

Photo credit: Old French Table by French Finds on Flickr, used under a CC-BY license.