Three tips for better tables in your documents

I’m sure you all write documents that involve tables of some kind, whether they are income and expenditure summaries, or analysis of some non-financial data. Here are three tips for presenting your tables so that they convey your message quickly and easily.

Use titles

Give your table a title that conveys the message the reader is supposed to receive from the data. Be explicit. Think like a newspaper editor trying to give a headline to the table. Instead of title that describes the data, such as “Quarter 3 income and expenditure summary”, give it a title that summarises the key message, such as “Budget surplus increased in quarter 3”.

Remove the borders

The default table style in Word puts a gridline around every cell of the table. Gridlines do not help the reader to understand the data. 

Once all the gridlines are removed you may feel that some cell borders would be useful. For example you might want the data in the total row to have top and bottom borders (although sometimes you can achieve the emphasis with bold and/or larger text). Similarly you might want to draw attention to a specific column and that could be done with text formatting or cell-shading rather than borders. Whatever technique you use for emphasis just use one throughout the report. It will be confusing for readers, and look terrible, if there is a mix of colours, bold and italics text and shaded cells.

Bonus tip: turn off the gridlines when you work on spreadsheets. You’ll find it easier to see the data and also get a preview of what the document would look like if you printed it.

Order data intentionally

It might be logical to have the rows in your table in alphanumeric order but that may make it harder for readers to see what you want them to see. Therefore order the data in a way that makes it easier for the reader. For example, if you want to draw attention to a large number (such as budget-actual variance) it might be better to order the rows in descending order of the variance.

Following these tips can change a table from this …

to this …

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