Knowledge Center
Add Pizzazz with Borders & Shading
The Borders and Shading function within Word can help you change your documents from plain text to stand out, attention grabbing documents.
Below is an example of a standard table containing organized data. It tells the story but it could be edited to be a little more appealing.
How about adding some borders using the format, borders/shading menu.
First select the row, column or individual cell that you would like to format.
Choose, format, then borders and shading. This opens another dialog box with a borders selection tab and a shading selection tab.
Let’s first add some borders. First click the style of border on the left side of the dialog box.
Then click or select/deselect the “sides” of the table on the right side of the dialog box. In this same area you can also choose interior lines by clicking in the center of the preview diagram.
So far we have chosen to add borders to all cells, then reselect the empty table cell and clicked the top and left sides of the cells to deselect the borders. Now we have borders around the cells which have data only.
Already you can see that the table is more defined. Now let’s add some color and shading.
Select the cells that you would like to add color/shading.
Then choose format, borders and shading, then choose the shading tab.
From there, choose the shading table and select from either a pre-defined color palette, or choose more colors and expand the range of colors.
Underneath color in the format, borders and shading dialog box there is a patterns window in which you can select from a number of shading options.
Both the shading and colors can be used in either a combination or alone.
For our table we chose a light blue to highlight the months and yellow to draw attention to the days of the week.
Now, compare the two tables together and you can now clearly see how much more interesting the one with the color looks and it only took a matter of moments to accomplish this.
Kimberly Deprey
Copyright 2008
