Creating a timetable schedule using tables in Word 2016

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at making a good looking table like this one from scratch. We'll also look at starting with some of the templates, because they can be really handy too. All right, let's get going.

So we're going to get started, we're going to go to Word. Now before we get started making our own one, it's great to know how to make your own, but often it's really good just to start with a template. So many good templates are online. In Word 2016, when you get started there's this little search option. You might have to go ‘File’, ‘New’ to get it. If you type in 'time table', you get two Excel documents. If you put 'timetable' as one word, you get a couple from Visio. It's all about the language. Took me a little while to work out that actually 'schedule' is that word we want. You'll find, there's actually hundreds of schedules. You might just find that-- this one here-- might not be exactly what you want. Say this 'Weekly Homework', you can go through, maybe just there, just kind of alternating colors that you want, it's got the days of the week, but you just need to go and change some of the settings. It's often easy just to get started here. Change the fonts, change the colors, take ownership of it, but that's not what we’re here to do, we're here to learn to make a table on our own, so we're going to make a new document. We're going to go 'Home', click 'Blank', great!

The first thing I'm going to do is throw in a bit of text. Tayla, can you speed this up for me a little bit? Great! So we've got a bit of a title going, now we're going to put in our table, so just going to go to 'Insert', click this and drop it down, and this is where you get to decide how many rows down and columns across. In our case, it's going to be ‘5’ across, by ‘6’ down. There we go. 

We've got a really basic table, we're going to fill in some details. Tayla can speed this up again as well. So, even though I said 5x6, I've put in 6x5, so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to delete this row. We're going to click inside of it, right click, and there's one up here that says 'Delete', and we're going to actually delete this column. Great!

Down here we can right click and we can go to 'Insert', and we can go to 'Row Above' or 'Below'. There's another option just to the left, out here, just outside the box, you can see this little '+' button, adds another row as well, and this one is going to be-- ‘Dinner’ actually goes in there, and 'Client Visit' goes in there.

So we got a table, we can resize it by grabbing the corner here, we're going to do some basic styling, so I'm going to select all three across the top here, and we can use this little pop out to give it a fill color. I'm going to use my corporate color. I'm going to give the text the color of white, and then I want to align these guys so they are in the center rather than up the top, and you do it by-- There's 'Design' along the top here, and there's 'Layout'. 'Layout's what we're going to use mostly, and along here there's the options of where you want it to sit, so I'm going to align these guys 'center', I'm going to drag them up just to get it to fit in a little nicer, I'm going to zoom in a little bit as well, so I'm going to go to 'View', and let's go 'Page Width'. Great! We're going to do the same for all of these, I'm going to select all of these, go to 'Layout', 'Centered'. Looks nice.

We can manually go through and adjust the colors, but there are some options here in 'Design' you can click on. There’s some kind of basic ones to get started with. You might decide, actually something like this is a nice way to get started, and you can go and adjust from here. I'm going to 'undo' a bunch of times to get it back to how it was. 

The next thing is looking at splitting and spanning. In this case, let's say the same person is required for all three of these, my contact person, and name, so I'm going to try and join all these. I'm going to grab these three, and up the top here, under 'Layout', there's an option here that says 'Merge Cells', and it puts it down to just one cell. Do the same with all of these. Maybe I want to select all of these and merge them together, so that the contact name for this person is me, but I cover all three of these options.

The other thing you can do is, say you want to split this back up again. Let's say that I'm not in charge of dinner anymore, so what I can do is, I can go to 'Split Cells', and I'm going to split into '1' column and '2' rows, click 'OK'. Even though I said 2 rows, it jumps out and tries to match this, because it doesn't really know where to put those two rows, and what I'm going to do is maybe join these two now. Go to 'Merge'. 

One of the last style things is, let's select all of the text here, all the table at least, and up here where it says 'Borders', I'm going to pick 'No Borders', and it removes them all, or I can decide, maybe just to put ones that are inside the horizontal border, just to get lines going across, but let's say that you want to set this as a template now. Now there's not an option that just says 'Use this thing that I've made as a template' for the next one, so it’s a bit lame that way, so with the table selected, what you can do, up here under 'Design', you can use this little drop down arrow here, the last one in the group, and you can go 'I'd like to make a new table style' but you have to place it not on the one you've created but on ones that already exist in the templates along here, so the normal table starts the one that has pretty much no formatting. 

So what you can do is you can go through and work your way through and adjust this, so you don't spend too much time designing your table if you're going to turn it into a template, do it here. So I'm going to go through and I'm going to say I want the whole table to have lines around it, and I'd like the header row to have this color applied to it, so I'm going to click on that. I want the font to specifically be 'Arial' for the header row, but I want it to be 'Bold' as well. So you can go through and do these styles, give this style a name. I'm going to call this one 'BYOL Style'. Click 'OK'. Now if I go and make a new style, sorry make a new table, 'Table', looks like that, then I can click on my style, and it applies it, it's got the bolds in the top, and the riddly text down the bottom. So that's how to create a style, you kind of do it after the the fact and apply it there.

Another thing you can do, and what I do often rather than sitting at the style, is that-- I'm going to delete this table. There's something called 'Quick Parts', or in this case we're going to use a quick table, so select your table, by grabbing in the top left corner, let's go to 'Insert', and we could use, if you looked at it earlier, 'Quick Parts', 'Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery', and it's just going to dump that text on to your page when you're finished. We've looked at that already. 

There's something very similar, under 'Tables', if we go to 'Quick Tables', right down the bottom here, 'Save Selection to Quick Tables', I'm going to call this one 'BYOL Table Style'. It's going to save as a table, I'm going to click 'OK'. What it means is, later on, when I'm working on say a new document and I need to get that table kind of roughed into there, I can go to 'Insert', 'Tables’, and down here, 'Quick Tables', my first, actually not my first one, right down the bottom here, 'BYOL Table', and now I can make my adjustments from here. It's up to you how you want to get started, whether you use the styles, or whether you use the quick tables.

All right, that is an overview of how to use tables in Microsoft Word.