The good news: ta­bles are one of the hand­i­est tools in your word proces­sor. A ta­ble is usu­ally the right so­lu­tion for lay­out prob­lems where white-space char­ac­ters aren’t up to the task.

The bad news: ta­bles can be dif­fi­cult to use. The user in­ter­face for edit­ing them is com­plex and finicky. While I can’t give you a full tu­to­r­ial on us­ing ta­bles —re­fer to your man­ual or help file—I can give you a few di­rec­tional tips.

I’ve al­ready pointed out the ways in which type­writer habits have en­dured. But an un­for­tu­nate truth about word proces­sors is that their ba­sic model for page lay­out is sim­i­lar to that of a type­writer of a hun­dred years ago: the doc­u­ment is treated as one big col­umn of text. That’s great when all you need is one big col­umn of text. It’s not so great otherwise.

A ta­ble is use­ful if you have a spread­sheet-style grid of data. In the type­writer era, a grid like this would have been han­dled with tabs and tab stops. These days, you’d use a table.

A ta­ble is also use­ful if text in your lay­out needs to be po­si­tioned side-by-side or float­ing at spe­cific lo­ca­tions on the page. (Two com­mon ex­am­ples are let­ter­head and cap­tion pages.) Mak­ing these is of­ten frus­trat­ing with ba­sic lay­out tools, but eas­ier with tables.

Your word proces­sor’s de­fault ta­bles have two for­mat­ting de­fects you should al­ways fix: cell bor­ders and cell mar­gins.

Cell bor­ders are the lines around each cell in the ta­ble. Cell bor­ders are help­ful as guides when you’re load­ing in­for­ma­tion into the ta­ble. They’re less use­ful once the ta­ble is full. The text in the cells will cre­ate an im­plied grid. Cell bor­ders can make the grid clut­tered and dif­fi­cult to read, es­pe­cially in ta­bles with many small cells.

In this ex­am­ple, cell bor­ders are un­nec­es­sary. In other cases, they can be use­ful. The goal is to im­prove the leg­i­bil­ity of the ta­ble. When you’re ready to for­mat your ta­ble, I rec­om­mend turn­ing off all the cell bor­ders to start, and then turn­ing them back on as needed. (See rules and bor­ders for more tips.)

Cell mar­gins cre­ate space be­tween the cell bor­ders and the text of the cell. In­creas­ing the cell mar­gins is the best way to im­prove the leg­i­bil­ity of a dense table.

The de­fault cell mar­gins, es­pe­cially in Word, are too tight. With cell mar­gins, a lit­tle goes a long way—start around 0.03″ and in­crease by in­cre­ments of 0.01″. Also, there’s no need to make the cell mar­gins the same on all sides. The top and bot­tom mar­gins can be big­ger than the side mar­gins, if that looks right.