Office Live Small Business - Tables
Here is a short webcast showing how to use tables within the Microsoft Office Live Small Business service.
Step 1: Prepare Your Software
In this session, we’re going to look at using tables to help in the design of your website. Now this is a tip that a lot of professional web designers actually use when they’re designing websites using professional web design tools.
But even in the site builder package, we can actually use tables to enhance the way our website is going to look. So I’m going to just click on ‘Manage pages’ and I will drop a new page into the website. I’m going to use the general template and I’ll call it ‘test’.
Step 2: Insert Your Table
Click finish, and we’ve got a new page that we can start working with.
So, let’s get rid of the dummy data. Just delete that, and then we click ‘Table’ up here, to insert a table. And you can see you get various different templates that you can use such as; ‘service comparison', ‘product comparison’, and ‘product description’.
I tend to use the generic style here where you can actually start working from scratch.
Step 3: Drop It Into The Website
And in here we start with 4 columns and 4 rows which I think is fine.
Let’s drop that into the website.
So we can see straight away we’ve got a little table dropped in there.
If I click ‘Save’ and then ‘View’ we get an instant view on the web of what that table might look like.
Step 4: Make The Size Right For You
Let’s go in and make some changes to it now.
So if I go, right click and ‘Properties’, we can start off by saying well let’s make the table a little bigger. Let’s make it 580 pixels wide and 400 high.
If I click ‘Apply’ I can see immediately the table becomes a little bit bigger. And you can play around with that to get the right size you want for your website.
Step 5: Change The Background Colour
Again if I click right click and ‘Properties’, we can go in there and for instance change the background color.
I might want to make it say, a gray shade for that.
Click ‘Ok’; let’s have a look at that. ‘Save’, and then ‘View’, and again we’ve got quite a different looking table there on the site.
Step 6: Add Images and Text
Now in here I can upload images. If I say click on the image here, we’ve only got one in there. So I’ll drop that one in, way too big I can resize that.
So that’s now how you can start playing around with images. I can put some text in here. Write text in this cell, of course I can put that in just as normal or I can press ‘return’ and it’s wrapped around there.
Step 7: Edit Your Table
Again, the site’s starting to look a bit different now.
There you go, there’s the photo in there and some of the text that we’ve got.
Now I might want to go in and maybe delete a column. Maybe I want to go in and delete a row.
Again I can do that and have a look what the website looks again; quite different now.
Step 8: Get Rid Of The Black Line Inside
You can still see we’ve still got those black lines in there.
If you want to get rid of those go back in, right click ‘Properties’, and all I do there is change the border width to 0.
Click ‘Apply’, ‘Save’, ‘View’ and there is my table without any of the inside borders showing.
Step 9: Get Rid Of The Black Lines Outside
It’s got a thick black line around the edge now, and if you want to change that go in ‘Properties’.
Let’s change the border color say to white.
Click ‘Apply’ and there you go, now even the border around the edge is gone.So you can really do quite a bit of manipulation to change the way your table looks and improve the look and feel of your website.
