What's new with tables, borders, and shading tools?

Word 97 provides the following new features to make it faster and easier to work with tables, borders, and shading.

Feature Description

Draw Table tool Lets you create and customize tables. You use this intuitive drawing tool much the same way you use a pen to draw a table ¾ just click and drag to draw the table boundaries and cell partitions. You can now make individual cells any height and width you want.

Eraser tool Lets you easily remove any cell, row, or column partition to achieve the same effect as merging two cells. In earlier versions of Word, you could only merge cells if they were in the same row. In Word 97, you can merge any adjacent cells ¾ vertically or horizontally.

Vertical alignment Lets you align cell contents at the top, center, or bottom of the cell, using the convenient alignment toolbar buttons. If your text is oriented vertically, the buttons automatically adjust to give you left, center, and right alignment.

Vertical text direction Makes your text flow vertically (rotated 90 degrees) in table cells, text boxes, and frames. This is a useful feature for creating labels and also for publishing oriented documents where credits or copyrights are printed sideways.

In-table row resizer Lets you adjust any row's height directly in your table by dragging the row border up or down, just as you adjust column widths. If you hold down ALT while you drag, the new vertical ruler shows you the exact row height.

Feature Description

New border styles Gives you more than 150 border styles to customize the look of your documents. This includes 3-D styles and several publishing-oriented styles that allow multiple line borders, which are especially popular in professional documents.

Page borders Lets you put a border around each page. In addition to the 150 new border line styles, Word provides Publisher's fun Border Art for page borders, which includes more than 160 art styles. Page borders are also highly customizable. For example, you can have:· Unique border style for each page edge.· Headers and footers in the border area.· A different first page.

Text borders Lets you apply borders to words or characters within a paragraph. You can literally "block out" pieces of text by applying any of the available border styles. Text borders also make it easier to put borders around headings.

Text shading Lets you call out parts of your document for other users. Just as you apply shading to paragraphs, now you can apply it to selected words or characters within a paragraph. Choose any shading color or gradation.