Basic Working Procedures > Working with Tables

Help & Manual supports fully-formatted complex tables. Your tables can have styles, borders, background colors, background images, alternating colors in alternating rows and much more. Tables break automatically at page boundaries in PDF and other print-style output formats, both between rows and within rows.

You can also define styles for tables in the same way as for paragraphs. This allows you to format complex tables in seconds and when you change the style definition all tables formatted with the table style will be updated automatically.

You can insert tables with the Table tool in Write > Insert but all the main tools for manipulating tables are in the Table tab of the ribbon. Most of the tools here are self-explanatory – just make selections in your table and select the tools.

•	Table styles are defined and managed together with paragraph and text styles. To create and edit table styles select Styles > Edit Styles in the Write tab.

•	To apply a style to a table just click in the table and then select Table > Properties and select the style you want to use.

•	You can also select a style when you are defining a new table.

See Table styles for more details.

A table is inserted as a single paragraph containing a single object (the table). It is not possible to add any more objects to this paragraph. For example, if you type a character in the paragraph before or after the table this will automatically insert a new paragraph. This has two important consequences:

•	You can delete an entire table by pressing the Delete or Backspace key once.

•	You can indent and center tables by applying paragraph formatting to the paragraph containing the table.

Copying, cutting and pasting is restricted to single cells and entire tables. You can copy, cut and paste entire tables and the contents of single cells. You cannot copy either the contents of multiple cells, or columns, rows or ranges of cells.

Microsoft Winhelp is an obsolete format that lacks support for a number of modern formatting options. These include table borders, nested tables, borders, background colors, superscript and subscript. It is advisable not to use these features for Winhelp. If you want to output to both Winhelp and other formats you can create alternative versions using conditional output.