Comments on: #TuesdayTutorial: Improving A Table’s Appearance

By: Ben Joel

Ben Joel — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 20:29:29 +0000

I’ve used Word for many years now, both in and out of school, and I would say I’m very proficient with the application. I’ve used tables most often when writing lab reports, but I very seldom tinker with columns. The Lynda videos on creating and formatting tables were a great refresher that will help me when formatting my Analysis project. The videos on columns actually taught me some knew things. I always assumed it was difficult to setup columns in Word, but it turns out that it’s not so hard. Should I ever want to break up a future document with columns, I know a little bit more now.

By: Kimberly

Kimberly — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 16:26:12 +0000

I have never had to use MS Word for this purpose, but in the future these videos would be very helpful. I also look forward to using the information in these videos for the Writing Analysis project, as well as future projects. Often times it is much easier to put information in a chart for projects within my major. The documents and specifications that we are required to use are long and tedious to read and often times it is difficult to quickly find the exact answer you’re looking for. By creating a chart using the information in these videos, I could re-format this information into a quick reference that would save a lot of time, effort, and energy.

By: Clement Boateng

Clement Boateng — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 21:35:51 +0000

I found this post helpful because the videos show how to format tables in word. It is always a good idea to format information to get the attention of reader. Using myself as an example, if a document has a bunch of words just thrown on it, it is hard to read and pay attention to it. So it is better to format a document in a way that keeps the reader interested.

By: Daniel Ott

Daniel Ott — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 19:12:05 +0000

I have always wondered how newspapers and lab reports were formatted in this way. I never knew that there was a function in word that could separate my paragraphs into columns. I feel like this can make lab reports look more presentable and official. It can make your reports stand out from the rest and seem a little more interesting to read. Additionally, I think that subtle colors such as grey can be used to enhance a table, but too much color can ruin it and make it seem childish. As with most things, it is important to find a balance to keep it professional and entertaining.

By: Youngsu Kim

Youngsu Kim — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 03:40:31 +0000

I think I have worked with Word many times for project reports, but I never used and even knew that there was a function that breaks paragraphs in the columns. I also found that the splitting paragraphs in the columns more readable than just normal left-to-right formatted paragraph. This technique will definitely help for my coming projects.

By: shuai liu

shuai liu — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 01:31:02 +0000

I have done the document design for my first-year engineering class. When we were designing a post for our group project. We implemented the columns, tables, and lists.
MS word is a great software, it almost handles every document design tasks.

By: Katie Cox

Katie Cox — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 14:16:29 +0000

Last semester, during my co-op, I had to learn a lot of the items covered by this Lynda video. A big portion of the projects I worked on included tables, from lab data to parsing computer data output. Learning how to organize all of this in a way that is both easy to understand and gets the information across is extremely important. Merging cells, highlighting colors–all of these have made spreadsheets with thousands of cells manage to have a cohesive aesthetic look that I could present to upper management. I think that goes to show how useful these tools are in real-world applications.

By: Zachary Cohen

Zachary Cohen — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 22:22:07 +0000

I found this video to be very interesting. I had never really thought about the benefits of splitting my writing in columns, or even the prospect of splitting something into columns. I definitely think the speaker is right though that text becomes a little more manageable to read when it is separated into columns. It requires a lot less eye movement which helps to keep the reader focused on the text, and in some cases I feel it makes the text a little more visually appealing.

By: Michael Severance

Michael Severance — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 16:34:35 +0000

I found this video to be really useful. Most of the professional documents and datasheets I read are written in two columns or more. I rarely see professional documents written in the standard single column format. I always thought this format looked really nice, but I never figured out how to format it easily in Microsoft Word. I plan on using this format more now that I know how to easily create columns.

By: Mark Marut

Mark Marut — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 03:49:41 +0000

This is actually a very useful set of videos, because I actually did not really think to use these advanced features. However, after reading this video, the preset tables, as well as the layout and formatting for tables will help me organize my data more efficiently. I have always made my tables using the traditional dragging the squares and creating the number of rows and columns desired, but the ability to make tables with the desired sizes and number if lines in between cells is awesome. I’m currently doing undergraduate research, and I compile tons of data every week, and I always put it into a black and white equal sized grid table, but now I will actually use these other features to make headers more clear, and emphasize certain data points. In addition, this will be helpful while I progress through the Analysis of Writing project.

I also know that using predisposed programs such as Matlab, and LaTeX as Josh mentioned above allows for more programmable features, but I think the low learning curve associated with Microsoft word, allows for a better use of time, and perhaps in the future if people have more time, and they wish to really delve into how to customize their tables and charts they can use some other programs.