Blogging with windows live writer. 7

Inserting a table.

When would you want to insert a table into your blog post?  Well, you might be wanting to post up a Recipe for example and need to keep all your ingredients lined up in a well formatted and attractive manner, inserting a table  allows you to do this. Many think of a table as just for numbers but in fact you can use it for anything where you need to keep the contents separate from each other and lined up neatly so that the presentation looks neat and attractive.

So let’s me show you how inserting a table can help!  First of all I need to decide how I want my table to look. I only need to keep my content in two separate lines (or columns) so I’ll choose to use that format for my table.

Click on Table from the insert tab after making sure that you cursor is placed inside you post exactly where you want your table to appear.  You will see the Table window where you can decide how your table will look.  As I only require two columns for mine, and one row I choose 2 columns and one row.  Next I must decide how wide I require the table to be. I need it the width of my writing space so I’ll choose 710 pixels wide for this blog. Now I can begin to insert my content into each column.

Vanilla Ice Cream Chocolate Ice Cream Mini Marshmallows

Chocolate Brownies Chocolate flavoured fudge sauce Chocolate Flake

Hmm.  Each ingredient is fairly close to the next one in the list. So I think I will keep them all separate from each other by giving each ingredient a separate row which will afford me more control over the distance for each ingredient in the list and how it displays. So I am going to change my table to 2 columns and three rows.  Here is my new table. 

Vanilla Ice Cream	Chocolate Brownies
Chocolate Ice Cream	Chocolate flavoured fudge sauce
Mini Marshmallows	Chocolate Flake

Now I will be able to alter the distance between each ingredient by altering the size of the area between each row by ‘padding out’ the distance between them. I do this by altering the size of the ‘Space between cells’ and making it a larger  amount, I have changed it from 2 to 10. You can make yours any number you like.

Vanilla Ice Cream	Chocolate Brownies
Chocolate Ice Cream	Chocolate flavoured fudge sauce
Mini Marshmallows	Chocolate Flake

That looks better!  Next I need to format the contents of each ingredient because I want them to display centrally in each cell so that it looks neat.  In order to do that I just right click on the table, select  Column Properties and then choose for the Horizontal alignment Centre, and for the Vertical Alignment the middle and then press OK. All of your cells within your columns will now format the text inside them in the middle centre of each cell.

Now that looks more or less how I want my table contents formatted, apart from the text.

Vanilla Ice Cream	Chocolate Brownies
Chocolate Ice Cream	Chocolate flavoured fudge sauce
Mini Marshmallows	Chocolate Flake

I want to use a different font and text size from the default. One more in keeping with a recipe or Menu for example. I can do this in each cell in exactly the same way that I can choose the font in my post inside Writer. Just highlight the text in each cell and then choose your font that you wish to use. I have used Brush Script MT size 24.

Vanilla Ice Cream	Chocolate Brownies
Chocolate Ice Cream	Chocolate flavoured fudge sauce
Mini marshmallows	Chocolate Flake

I can even change the colour if I wish. Now my ingredient list is complete. All I need to do now is make the table ‘invisible’ so that the text looks as if it is simply lined up without using a table, and then my neatly lined up ingredients can be displayed under a title for this recipe.

In order to do this, all I have to do is right click inside my table, and untick the box next to Show table border and then the whole table will now become  invisible inside my post.  I just need to add the title above it for this Recipe like so

 Chocolate Indulgence.

Vanilla Ice Cream	Chocolate Brownies
Chocolate Ice Cream	Chocolate flavoured fudge sauce
Mini marshmallows	Chocolate Flake

And that’s my finished Chocolate Indulgence ingredients!  You can also insert a picture into a table as well, and I hope that I have shown you how useful inserting a table into your post can be allowing you to easily create pristine looking Menu’s, recipe’s or anything else that needs that extra formatting of your text. Try it out yourself and see what you can come up with!

TG

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