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Tables are good for so much more than just organizing data in rows of numbers and web design. Although you can do that with tables, I am going to start with the basics, how you create the table and merge cells, split cells and then I am going to move on to actually creating a complex design using images and texts and using a table to control the alignment and placement of those elements on the screen. So let us start by just creating a blank document we can play with. Do not even worry about the title or saving the page. I just want to show you how you insert the table and a couple of things you can do with it.
Start by clicking the table icon in the common Insert bar. That will open the table dialog where you can specify the number of rows, columns, table width. Notice you can set the table width to a percent or to a fixed pixel size. If you use the percent option, your table is going to adjust to a percentage of the browser window on your visitor’s screen. So somebody has big monitor and they have the browser filling the screen. Then if your table is set to 80%, it is going to have a lot more room and if somebody is on small laptop with a very small monitor and they have the browser set to maybe the most in the full screen. No matter what size your visitor’s browser, if you set the table width to a percentage, it will adjust to fit the available space in the browser window. Most designers want to have control over their designs choose pixels and they choose pixels because they do not want that table to adjust because once a table adjusts, it will move around the contents of that table, the images, the texts, the other elements.
For this table I am just going to create a 500 pixel-wide table so we can have plenty of room on the screen to see what it looks like. I am going to set the boarder to five so you can see how a thick boarder looks around a table and I am going to weigh on cell padding and spacing until we have created it so you can see added in. You can add a header to your table. You can have a header go all the way down the left, across the top or left and top. I usually just leave the header set to none. If you choose header Dreamweaver will make the content bold to emphasize it. But I like having more design control so I may format a header if I choose to use one in whatever formatting options I want. You can format the content in a table cell just as you would format text or other content anywhere else on a page.
The bottom part of the screen is accessibility options and again these are things for people who are using browsers that read the page so the caption, the align caption and the summary are all things that will not actually appear in the browser window or display on a page, but they are important information if somebody is using a browser that is reading the page to them. I am going to click okay. Now you see that my table appears on the page. It is 500 pixels wide and it is going to stay 500 pixels wide no matter how wide somebody’s screen is and it has got a thick boarder because I set that boarder to five.
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