2018.1

Table Of Contents
Via the Formatting dialog
The Formatting dialog allows you to change the font, font size and color (see "Fonts" on
page651), the borders (see "Border" on page644), the cell padding (the distance between the
edge of the cell and its content, see "Spacing" on page655), and the background color or
image of the table and its cells ("Background color and/or image" on page643).
To open the Formatting dialog for one cell or for the table as a whole:
l
Click in a cell and choose Format > Table or Format > Table Cell.
l
Right-click it and choose Cell... or Table... from the shortcut menu.
Note that in this case Table styles the table as a whole. When you choose Table and change
the border, for example, the borders of the cells inside it will not be changed.
To style all cells in a table or row at the same time via the Formatting dialog, you have to select
the table or row first; see "Selecting a table, row or cell" on the previous page. Next, to open the
Formatting dialog, choose Format > Table Cell. The settings that you make now will be
applied to all cells in the selected row or table.
For information about specific options in the formatting dialogs, see "Table Formatting dialog"
on page810 and "Table Cell Formatting dialog" on page813.
Via a style sheet
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) offer more ways to style a table and its contents, than the
Formatting dialog does. This is especially true for Detail Tables. With local formatting, all rows
that are added on the fly (in Preview mode and in output) will look exactly the same as the first
one. Alternating row colors, for example, in dynamically added rows can only be done via CSS.
How to do this is described below.
Another good reason to prefer style sheets over local formatting for Detail Tables, is that the
output from a Detail Table is created slightly faster when it's styled via Cascading Style Sheets
than when it's styled with local formatting.
How to use style sheets is explained in another topic; see "Styling templates with CSS files" on
page616.
Page 636