Design Web pages by using nested tables in Word

Do you need to make a Web page? In Word you can save any document you're working on as a Web page. And you can design your page with nested tables that are easy to make with the Draw Table tool.

Nested tables are just tables inside other tables, but they're one of the most typical ways to design Web pages. Just think of a Web page as one big table that holds other tables. Placing text and graphics inside different table cells helps you to lay out the different parts of your page.

How to make nested tables

Use the Draw Table tool in Word to draw your tables. Then select a table cell and insert text or graphics. To save your document as a Web page, click Save as Web page on the File menu.

When you save a document as a Web page

When you save a document as a Web page, Word creates the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags used on all Web pages. The HTML tags tell Web browsers how to format and display text and graphics on Web pages, just as you tell Word how you want a regular Word document to look when you select a formatting style, or when you decide where to insert a graphic. If you'd like to see the HTML tags created for a page, click HTML Source on the View menu.

Tips

A few things to keep in mind:

• Work in Web Layout view (on the View menu, click Web Layout) so that you can see how your page will look in a browser as you create it.
• Insert text or press ENTER to insert paragraph marks above a nested table before you draw it. The text or paragraph marks keep the nested table from moving up the page to the bottom of another table cell. To see paragraph marks, click Show/Hide on the Standard toolbar.
• Don't complicate your design unnecessarily by adding too many nested tables - for best results, keep it simple.
• You can make table borders invisible so that no one sees the underlying design grid of the page (Table menu, Hide Gridlines command).
• Create more or less white space in your design with changes in cell spacing and cell padding (or default cell margins). To make changes in white space, click Table Properties on the Table menu, and then click the Options button).
• Most audio text readers for people with low vision read tables from right to left and from bottom to top, so you may want to consider this when putting a lot of text into tables.

For more information about creating Web pages, type Save a Word document as a Web page in the Office Assistant or on the Answer Wizard tab in the Help window, and then click Search.