There are many times when you want parts of your text to be located in exact positions but often just hitting the Enter key one time moves them all over the place. People who create html Web Pages have known for a long time that the only way to maintain control over this is to use tables, instead of using the Enter key or the tab key to align text. Tables allow you to size and position separate parts of a page so the information stays put, no matter what other text you add above, below, or within it.

Let’s say you are entering names and addresses into a list and you are lining everything up with tabs and your data looks something like this.

I did all of that just hitting my tab key a few times whenever I wanted the text to move over and line up below the entry above. So far, there’s no problem. But, what if John moves to St. Petersburg, FL and Mary moves to 75 Anderson Rd., Apt. 15? Look what happens:

See how everything got knocked out of alignment? Now I have to play around with my tab stops and maybe even add spaces to get things lined up properly again, and sometimes it’s not even possible. Usually, once I get one line fixed, the line below it now is out of alignment.

If you turn on your hidden characters (the Show/Hide button on the Standard toolbar that looks like a backward P), this is what this data looks like:

Each of those arrows indicates that I hit my tab key there. Now, let’s convert this text to a table and see how much better it behaves. Before we can convert it to a table, we need to normalize it.

Normalizing the data requires using Find/Replace to make the tab stops uniform. You can see that sometimes I hit my tab key once between columns and other times I hit it twice, trying to keep things lined up nicely. So, using Find/Replace to replace all the double tabs with single tabs will make things consistent. You can find and replace tabs by using ^t, so just enter ^t^t in the "Find what" box, and enter ^t in the "Replace with" box. If you used more than two tab stops anywhere, you will have to run Find/Replace two or more times to catch them all. When you are done, your data will look like this:

Note that it is still not lined up correctly, but the tab stops are uniform now, since there’s only one tab stop in each place where we want to create a new column in our table.

Highlight all of the data and go to the Table menu and choose Convert>Text to Table. Be sure the number of columns says 5 and Tabs is selected where it says "Separate text at" and click OK. Now you should have a table that looks something like what you see below:

To make it look perfect, click inside the Table and go to the Table menu and choose Select>Table. With the table selected, go to the Table menu and choose AutoFit>AutoFit to Contents, then adjust the font to a size where your addresses and cities fit on one row. And, finally, while your table is still selected, go to the Format menu and choose "Borders and Shading" and click on the box that says "None". And here’s what you end up with:

If you still see gray lines that look like borders, they are not. They are simply gridlines and they will not print. But, if you don’t want to see them, just return to the Table menu and choose "Hide Gridlines".

Now, you can edit the data all you want and it will always remain correctly aligned.

Another advantage to using tables instead of tabs is, if a list is created with tab stops, using Arial, 12 pt. as the normal font style and looks just fine on your computer, then that document is opened on a different computer where Word is set up for Times New Roman, 8 pt. normal font, the list will be totally misaligned.

Next time you want to create a list with data in columns, use a table from the start and you won’t have to go through all of this normalization and conversion.

In this example, let’s say you want to put your document title on the bottom left of your page and your page number on the bottom right. Doing this through Word’s Header and Footer View is relatively easy, but if you want text aligned both left and right on the same line, you have to use a table. Otherwise, everything on that line will be aligned left or right, but not both.

Go to the View menu and choose Header and Footer. Once in Header and Footer View, move down to your footer and click inside the dotted footer box and insert a two-column, one-row table in the footer. Now simply type the title of your document in the left cell and check your formatting toolbar to make sure it’s aligned left. Then click into the right cell and use the Header and Footer toolbar to insert a page number and use your Formatting toolbar to align that to the right. Then follow the directions above to remove the borders of the table. Now you have left alignment and right alignment on the same line. And, you can do this whenever you want multiple alignments on a line, not only in footers.

These are just two examples of why using tables for alignment is important. There are many more instances where this will make your formatting and alignment much less troublesome. Another great use for tables is to create fun stuff like paper bookmarks.  Read my tip on that here. And don't miss the article I wrote in ABC, Vol. 33 on aligning text and graphics in Word.

Linda Johnson is a college instructor of all of the Microsoft Office Programs, as well as Adobe PhotoShop and Windows. She also teaches online distance learning classes in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word at Eclectic Academy. She has worked helpdesk and teaches and lectures at many local businesses and tech schools in her area. Support this newsletter by checking out Linda's eBooks, MS Word MAGIC!, Book I: Fonts, Fun & Formats and Book II: Table Wizardry, How To Get Started As a Software Trainer, and her newest series of MSOffice eBook Tutorials and CD