Formatting Data Tables

You've already learned how you can change border and background colors to format your tables. But Dreamweaver goes one step further and offers you several preset options to format your table. Let's take a quick look. Here's a plain old table created in Dreamweaver.

This table can be a little difficult to read because it needs some formatting to distinguish between different rows and columns. Let's try Dreamweaver's preset table formatting options. First select the table, and then go to the "Commands" menu and select "Format Table." There you'll find a menu of preset table formats, or you can use the available options to quickly format your table with a custom look. Here is the table from above after just a couple clicks of the mouse:

If you can't find a preset format that works for your table, not to fear. It's still very easy to manually format your table in Dreamweaver to quickly and easily make your tables very user-friendly. Here's that same table, and in less than a minute, you can make your table attractive and functional.

Now we have a table that is well-organized, with easily-identified separations between column headings and actual data. We've also added color as a visual representation, thus adding to the table's functionality.