Information marching across the page by ranks and columns looks more purposeful than when it’s milling about in paragraphs. But, even with a computer, laying out a table is labor-intensive.
The layout below will provide some useful guidelines. It exemplifies a “formal” table of the kind scientists and scholars construct when they have categories-within-categories of data to deal with.
The illustration is based on the ‘best practices’ recommended by the Chicago Manual of Style, a compendium of typographic and other conventions compiled over many years and many editions by the University of Chicago Press. This table features categories within categories, both in the header (the column head “spanner”) and within the left column, which printers used to call the stub. Columns are numbered so they can be easily referenced in the text. No matter what program you use, you’re probably going to have to come up with some workarounds to get the table to look the best it can. For example, Excel doesn’t allow for footnotes.
Use Word or Excel for formal tables?
Created in Microsoft Excel, the table illustrated above is passable, typographically speaking, but not particularly elegant. Better formatting might be achievable with Microsoft Word’s table tools.
However, judging by the MS Word documents we receive from clients, most people don’t use Word’s table tools. This is probably because, with Word, you (or I, at least) can’t always get the table to do what you want it to. But you may be able to get a little more done with help from the Microsoft Word MVPs.