How to add a Table to Google Docs

How to add a Table to Google Docs

Sometimes you will include information in your document that just isn’t suited for a paragraph or a bulleted list.

Take this course outline for example.
There is a lot of information here, but placing it in a table makes the data easy to read and quick to understand. In this lesson we will look at creating a table inside a document, and modifying it to fit our needs.


The first step is deciding how many rows and columns you want. Rows, go horizontally and columns go vertically. Let’s make a table that’s 4 columns long and 5 rows high.


Congratulations! We’ve created a generic and boring table. Let’s add some shading to the top row where we would add headings.
To do this, click and drag across the top row, then head back to the Table menu and select Table Properties.

This window gives you control of how your table looks. You can change the border color and thickness, change the alignment, and set a background color. Click on the box under Cell background color and select a light gray.

Now each cell on your top row is a nice shade of gray.


Now let’s pretend that we changed our mind and now only want 3 columns in our table, and want to add an extra row. Editing this is simple. Just click on any cell in the row you want to remove, right click and choose “Delete Column". If you don’t like right clicking the same option is under the Table menu.

Just a word of warning! Any information in those cells would have been deleted when we removed their column.


To add another row to the bottom of our table, we click on any bottom cell, right click and choose “Insert Row Below”. Again, this option is found under the Table menu if you don’t want to right click.


Great! There is just one more table feature that is sometimes handy to know. From time to time you may want to merge two or more cells into a single cell. Let’s imagine that somewhere in the middle of our table we want to separate out an entire row.
To do this we can select all the cells we want to merge, go to the table menu or right click, and choose “Merge Cells”

Now those 3 cells have been combined into a single cell. If we wanted we could go back in to our table properties and add change the row to a light green background.


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© Michael Kocher 2015