As you are working, remember to SAVE your work often (Ctrl + S) and UNDO (Ctrl + Z) if you make a mistake!

Hopefully you checked out the first set of instructions. (if not, go back and do part 1 first!) You should by now have:

• created your file
• named it Timetable
• saved it in either your OneDrive or Documents folder
• changed the layout of your paper so it is Landscape
• changed the margins so that they are Narrow
• inserted your table (11 x 9)
• merged your title row
• added the times and school days
• filled in the periods

Mine looks like this (based on the 605 schedule. Your periods may be different):

Now it’s time to start making things look a little better. Please only start to pretty things up AFTER you’ve filled in all of your information. For any class/project, the most important thing is to get some substance on your page/file. No matter how pretty a project looks, if there’s no decent information on the page/project, you’re not going to do well!

To change the look of your text, first you need to highlight it. Click and drag across to select, or double click to select a word, triple click to select a paragraph.

In the “Home” menu at the top of your screen, you will find a number of tools to change the look of your text.

The easiest thing that you can do to show that you care about how your work looks is to change the style of writing (typeface, usually called a “font.”) Never use the default font. It makes you look lazy! Always choose something that people can ACTUALLY READ. Some fancy fonts are way too hard to read. Why bother writing anything if nobody can read it? Also, don’t choose something that looks really boring and lifeless.

In general, I recommend NEVER using: Calibri (lazy), Times New Roman (so over done and so boring) or Comic Sans (it’s not cute anymore and hasn’t been for a very long time!)

You can also change the colour of your text. Again, make sure that your text is easy to read! A very light colour on a very dark background is a terrible idea. Same thing with dark on dark. You want HIGH CONTRAST, which is a big difference between light and dark (dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background.)

You may also choose to add emphasis to your text by using BOLD, ITALICS, OR UNDERLINING. DO NOT USE MORE THAN ONE! Choose!

SOMETIMES, text looks better in the middle of the page/cell. DO NOT OVERUSE this effect! When writing something for LA class, you may wish to center the TITLE, but DO NOT center everything!

In our case, having the text in your table centered actually looks pretty good, so feel free to center everything here.

DO NOT USE THE SPACEBAR to CENTER! Noooooooo! Don’t do it!

Instead, choose one of the paragraph layout options:

Now my text is starting to look a little better

You may notice that all of your text is lined up along the top edge of your cells, and that it looks bad. Well, you can center your text vertically as well!

 

You don’t even need to highlight your text, just put your cursor inside of a cell and then choose Layout under Table Tools

You’ll see a series of options. My favourite is to center things vertically and horizontally:

Ahhhhh… much better!

If you find that some text doesn’t quite fit inside of a cell properly, you can change the height of any row or the width of any column by putting your cursor right over top of one of the border lines. In this case, I’m going to choose the line on the far left and drag it left a little bit.

 

Take your time and make everything look nice. We’ll add some colour and shading and pictures in our next step!