Technical Writers’ Companion

Excessive lines don’t make it easier to read a table, but instead make it harder. Do without lines whenever you can.

If you use light background colors and shades of gray instead of lines, your tables will look much more professional. You can still indicate “lines” by leaving some white space between the different areas.

If you don’t want to do without lines completely, you should at least try to reduce the number of lines. For example, omit the lines at the sides of a table.

Make the remaining lines as thin as possible. As a rule of thumb, don’t make dark lines thicker than the lines in the letter “I” of the used body font. Lines in light colors can be up to 5 times wider.

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To help readers stay in the correct row, you can use zebra stripes instead of lines.

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Tables don’t always have to look like tables. Often, you can use a borderless, transparent table to position text and pictures.

In most authoring tools, dashed lines indicate a borderless table. When the document is printed, however, the table becomes invisible:

Often, you can simplify and shorten column headings or row headings by adding a main heading that spans several subheadings.

To show interrelationships, you can design a table as a matrix.

Within the matrix, you can use text or symbols. If you use symbols, add a legend.

If a matrix is symmetric, you can simplify it by omitting vice-versa relationships.

Alternative arrangements are:

Within the table cells, use the same font and the same font size as in the body text of your document. This has two important advantages:

▪It looks consistent.

▪You can use all body text paragraph styles and character styles also in your tables, for example, styles for lists, notes, warnings, and so on.

Don’t use a font size within column headings or row headings that’s larger than your body font size. Also, don’t make text in column headings or row headings bold. The reason is that only important information should be large and bold. The important information, however, is in the body of the table, not in its head. If you want to set off the heading visually, use a different background color for the heading than for the body of the table.

When column headings are very long, you can even use a font size that’s up to 2 points smaller than for the body of the table. In printed documents, using a smaller font size can be a very elegant solution and usually doesn’t pose any problems. In online help, however, be careful that the font size is still legible.

Use the same alignment for all cells within a column and for the column heading. For example, if you right-align the cells’ contents, also right-align the column heading.

In general, use the same alignment for all columns of a table. The leftmost column, however, should always be left-aligned, so it can be an exception.

If table headings are boxed, center them vertically. If there are headings that have fewer lines of text than other headings, align the top of the short headings with the top of the longest heading.

If table headings are unboxed, align them at the bottom, near the start of the columns that they label.

As a rule of thumb, a good value for the distance between the border and the text is the width of the small letter “m” of the used font and font size. The bottom margin often needs to be slightly larger to provide a harmonic visual impression (siehe Trust your visual judgment).

Note that typically most table cells aren’t completely filled with text, so most margins will be effectively larger than the configured padding.

To provide coherence, keep columns close together. Don’t make them wider than necessary.

If your document will be translated: Bear in mind that texts may be longer in other languages.

Never space out the columns of a table merely to fill out the full page width. If the table is smaller, this is perfectly OK. Left-justify the table within the text column.

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Sometimes, a column title is significantly longer than what goes into the cells of the column. Don’t make a column overly wide only because of the length of its title. If you have a very long column title, do one of the following instead:

▪Rephrase column titles and put them in note form.

▪Use a multi-level heading if that makes sense.

▪Run the text vertically or diagonally.

▪Slightly decrease the character spacing.

▪Use a font size up to 2 points smaller.

▪Add line breaks within the column heading.

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When you create online help, HTML makes it possible to set up auto-sizing tables. An auto-sizing table automatically adopts its width to the current width of the browser window. Within the table, either only one column can change its width, or all columns can change their widths proportionally.

Many tables have one column that clearly contains the bulk of the content. When that’s the case, a good solution is to make only the width of just this column variable, but to make the widths of all other columns static. This is also the most robust solution if you create online help and printed documents from the same text base (single source publishing).

If you can, avoid having table titles.

Table titles usually don’t add any valuable information. If you have a well-designed document, it should be clear from your subheadings and from the column titles of your tables what each table is about.

Usually, you only need table titles if you want to add a table of tables at the end of your document. However, having a table of tables is dispensable or even obstructive in most cases, too. Having a table of tables only makes sense if users want to look up specific data that they can’t easily find via the table of contents or via the index.

If you do decide to add table titles, add the titles above the tables rather than below. Other than with images (where figure titles usually go below the image) tables often span several pages. A table title below the table thus wouldn’t be visible when a reader starts reading the table.

Only add table numbers if your content is going to be published as a printed document or PDF file and if you plan to generate a table of tables (usually not recommended).

When adding table numbers, don’t number them throughout the document. Instead, number them chapter by chapter. This makes finding a particular table faster.

If you generate online help from the same text base as the printed document (single source publishing), make sure that the table numbers don’t appear in the online version, where they don’t make sense.

In general, avoid breaking tables, and especially avoid breaking small tables. With long tables, however, it’s usually better to tolerate a page break within the table rather than to end up with half an empty page before a table on a new page.

Enable the following features if your authoring tool supports them:

▪If you can’t avoid breaking a table, keep at least two rows of the table on each page.

▪If it isn’t obvious what information each column of a table contains, repeat the column headings after a page break on the new page.

▪If a table has a table title, repeat the table title on the new page, followed by the text “(continued)” in italic font style.