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What's in a name?

Highlights

Text tables show your readers that you’re trying to help.

Text tables give you a flexible way to sum up complexity. They’re a really helpful feature in any update, bulletin, article, newsletter, or seminar handout. Or pitch. Or pretty much any document that you can think of.

Clients value them as they summarise, and allow you to compare and contrast information.

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Clients find text tables useful, but authors
don’t use them as often as they could

They notice and remember text tables that highlight action points, explain pros and cons, or show the difference between old and new rules.

But many authors forget about tables or think they’re going to be too difficult to produce. We think that there are three reasons why expert-authors forget about text tables when they’re writing know-how updates:

• Text-only bias:
  If you’re used to thinking and writing great blocks of narrative text then a Word table is the last thing you’ll think of.
• Fear of Word, and it’s complex table-formatting tools:
  People find creating text tables in Word a pain because they’re not used to using Word’s table-formatting tools (and they haven’t got the benefit of automated Word templates).
• Internal design team and brand-and-design guidelines:
  At some firms, expert authors fight running battles with brand guidelines that don’t include helpful advice on how to format tables.

And here are some examples of how law firms can use text tables

We’ve put together a document that shows just how effective text tables and other non-text techniques (e.g. flowcharts and decision trees) are. It contains ten examples – to see our personal favourite click here.

Tame the Word-table beast: two helpful guides

We’re fans of text tables and what they can do. You can create timelines, rustle up a flowchart, or compare the new (or proposed) situation with the current state of play. But the way that Word creates text tables can seem a bit daunting.

Word’s powers are its weakness when it comes to text tables. It has very powerful text-table formatting tools, and some unhelpful default settings. Put these two factors together and it’s a cocktail of misery that puts lots of people off creating text tables. (Don’t be tempted to use Excel, by the way, as that’ll just create a different set of problems.)

But text-table help is at hand –  we’ve put together two pieces of advice to help you create clearer text tables:

a) One-page guide to five good table-features click here.
b) Detailed 15-minute video tutorial (see below).

A 15-minute video tutorial on creating text tables in Word

Now then, fear not – not every text table will take you 15 minutes. The tutorial is that long because:
– We’ve gone slowly and included every small step
– It’s basic Word rather than an automated Word-template.

If you click on the full-screen icon (bottom right of window below) you’ll see the video-tutorial at actual size (no zooms and pans to make you dizzy).

You’ll find it helpful to download the ‘five good text-table features’ guide first. It shows the table that’s created in the video with a list of the five tips, and it has a full-size version of the table that you an make your own notes on.