Creating pages inside tables

Tables are a key tool for organising a web site. Placing the text and images in a table lets you control how they are positioned on the page and stops large areas of text from sprawling everywhere. In the step by step example on the next page we've used a table to lay out the page. When you create a table you can format it by clicking in the table, right click and choose Table Cell Properties. The Cell tab controls what happens in a cell and the Table tab controls the table itself. As you can see in the table image on this page, you can colour each cell of a table individually very easily.

Use the Table tab to remove the Border lines from a table used to control the layout of the page - set this to 0 to remove the border. The Cell tab lets you control alignment of text in the cell - in particular to control vertical alignment and to colour a cell's background.

You can join cells in a table to create quite complex layouts and you can construct the table so it is a fixed size so it won't enlarge and contract when opened in a full screen browser window. To do this, from the Table tab of the Table Cell Properties dialog, set the width and height to fixed pixel values rather than a percentage of the browser window size.

By default the table is aligned to the left of the window, but you can choose Center if you like and it will be centred. While you can do this after the table is created, if you know beforehand the size you want a table to be, click the Table button and select the Precisely tab and specify the width and border options before you begin.