Working with tables is the main task of Excel, so the skills of constructing competent tables are the most necessary knowledge for working in it. And that’s why learning Microsoft Excel should begin first and foremost with mastering these basic fundamental skills, without which further mastery of the program’s capabilities is not possible.
In this lesson, we’ll use an example to show you how to create a table in Excel, fill a range of cells with information, and convert a range of data into a complete table.
Filling the range of cells with information
First, let’s enter the necessary data into the cells of the document, which then will consist of our table.
After that, you can mark the boundaries of the data. To do this, select the desired range of cells with the cursor, then go to the “Home” tab. Here we need to find the “Borders” parameter. Click the down arrow next to it, which will open a list of border options and select “All Borders”.
So, visually, the selected area began to look like a table
But it is not yet a full-fledged table, of course. For Excel, it is still just a range of data, which means that the program will process the data, respectively, not as a table.
How to convert a range of data into a full table
The next step to take is to turn this data area into a full-fledged table, so that it not only looks like a table, but is perceived by the program as such.
To do this, we need to select the “Insert” tab. After that, select the desired area with the cursor, and click on the item “Table”.
Note: If the window in which Excel is opened is small, you may find a “Tables” section in the “Insert” tab instead of the “Table” item, and by expanding it with a down arrow you can find the “Table” item that we need.
As a result, a window will open where the coordinates of the data area selected in advance will be indicated. In case everything was selected correctly, you don’t need to change anything and just click the “OK” button. As you may have noticed, this window also has the option “My table has headers”. It should be left checked if your table does have headers, otherwise it should be unchecked.
That is, in fact, all there is to it. The table is complete.
So, let’s summarize the information above. It is not enough to format the data visually in the form of a table. You need to format the data area in a certain way so that the Excel program perceives it as a table, and not just as a range of cells containing certain data. This process is not time-consuming at all and is done fairly quickly.
