How do I remove extra spacing in tables in my Word template?

Using MS Word as the report generator has enabled our customers to design some amazing client proposal forms. However, MS Word can be a bit of a challenge on occasion and this is one of them.

We helped one customer develop a report with a heap of cool tables and then selected special table formats to improve the appearance. They looked great. Only problem was the spacing in each cell was way too large and the tables spread out over a couple of pages. None of the table format tools would adjust the cell padding and line spacing - that is until we discovered that the line spacing in a table is controlled by the paragraph settings. (There is more detail on how to lock in selected Word table formats in the online help - click here for more details.)

If you really want the MS Word reports to look good, AND have all the detail you need in the most efficient space on the form, check the default settings in Word for your paragraph line spacing. The tables that are created actually use this spacing to set the line spacing in the table. There is no function for line spacing in tables, it gets it from the paragraph spacing (that was obvious – NOT!)

So if you have tables that look like this:

But you really need them to look like this to fit into your page design:

You need to adjust the paragraph spacing in this dialog in MS Word.

It will help going forward to set this as default, but ensure that it doesn't mess with any other document layout stuff you have.

You can also change the settings of your selected table format and get a very high impact display of your tables in the client proposal.

There is a lot more help available by searching the web, but this will at least solve one major issue in the layout of your tables by setting a contrasting highlight colour on your borders as shown above.