Table Dressing With iWork

Adding a background can spruce up a spreadsheet - and iWork makes it a breeze

Even Numbers’ built-in templates can’t mask the fact that, left to their own devices, spreadsheet tables can look pretty dull. Yes, it’s difficult to make rows and columns of data visually exciting - and some­times they shouldn’t be. If the sole purpose of a spreadsheet is totally your monthly income, any visual embellishments will be a distraction rather than a help.

In many cases, though, adding polish to a table - whether it’s in Pages, Numbers or Keynote - can really help bring it alive and clarify, rather than cloud, its contents. Restrained use of colour is often the most obvious way to go, but adding background images to spreadsheets is just as easy a way of adding both visual appeal and meaning to a table. However, despite being so easy to do, it’s something that, in my experience, is seldom used.

Perhaps one reason for this is that many users have cut their spreadsheet teeth on Excel, which, though it supports background pictures for spreadsheet tables, only does so in a limited - for that, read hopeless - fashion.

Tom Gorham has worked with Macs since 1991. Although his background is in print and web publishing, he’s a devotee of any software that makes life easier.

For example, background images in Excel are only visible on screen: they don’t appear when you print them out. By contrast, these restrictions don’t apply when you’re creating a table in iWork.

So how do you go about creating a background image for a table? There are two obvious ways. If you’re using Numbers, the first step is to drag the image you want to use as the background onto the sheet and move it to the background by right-clicking it and choosing Send to Back from the pop-up menu. Select the table grid that you want to appear above the background image and drag it over the background image. (The simplest way to select the table is to click outside the table and then select the table in the source list.)

Now you need to make the front most table trans­parent. Select the Graphic Inspector and from the Fill menu, choose None. The cells in the table become transparent, allowing the background to show through. In most cases, you’ll also want to get rid of the gridlines around each cell, as the image will probably look significantly better without them. In iWork, grid­lines are simply borders, so with the table grid selected, select the Table Inspector and, under the Cell Borders section, make sure that all borders are set to None rather than the default Thin in the pop-up menu.

iWork – to be more convenient

You’ll still see the cell borders when you click on the table to make it active, but don’t worry about that: they should dis­appear again when you click another table.You can then add individual borders back-for example, under a row containing a heading - to offset this from contents of the other cells.

If you’re using a dark back­ground, you might need to adjust the text colour of the table to provide enough contrast. Do this for all text at once by selecting the table and then adjusting the colour under the Text Inspector’s text tab. If the background still appears to be too busy, adjust the opacity of either the background image (in the Graphic Inspector) or the table grid in front of it in the Table Inspector. Rather than giving the table a background fill of none, for example, choose a fill colour of white, but adjust the Opacity slider to leave it at 20% opacity.

The second way to place a background image is to add it directly to the table. This is a handy way to keep table and image as a single element, which makes it easier to copy and paste the table intact to other iWork documents. However, it won’t be quite as flexible in terms of layout as adding the image as a separate element. You can, however, have separate background images for all tables in a sheet. To add the back­ground image to the table itself, select it and then in the Table Inspector, under the Cell Background section, choose Image Fill from the drop-down menu and navigate to the image.

A single background image may be the obvious choice to add depth and drama to a foreground table, but don’t overlook patterns, which can be indefinitely tiled across a background. There are two key advantages of using patterns that are applied directly to a table. First, you don’t have to worry about the size of the table for which you’re providing the background: as you add new rows and columns, the table background will tile appropriately. There’s another practical benefit: tiling means that you can use very small images, and as a result a tiled background for even a very large table won’t make that much of a difference to the docu­ment’s overall file size.

To add a pattern to a table, select it in the Sheets list and in the Table Inspector, choose the same Image Fill options under the Cell Background heading. As soon as you’ve selected an image, another drop-down menu appears that enables you to custom­ise how your image will appear in the table. Rather than the default Scale to Fit option, choose Tile. The pattern will now fill the table no matter how small or large it is.

While you can create your own patterns in an image editor, there are much easier ways to add good-look­ing tiled backgrounds. If you’re after some polished options fast, there are some excellent choices on the Subtle Patterns website (subtlepatterns.com). Although the examples on this site are primarily designed as backgrounds for web pages, they’ll look perfectly good for an on-screen presentation in iWork.

File size

When it comes to background images, there’s a difference in the approach taken by Excel and iWork apps, including Numbers. There’s no doubt Excel makes adding background image to an spreadsheet incredibly easy - click the huge Background button in the Layout Ribbon and select an image - but once you’ve got your background, there’s not a lot you can do with it. You can’t scale it or position it at a particular place and a background image auto­matically tiles, so for your background image to fit your table, it may involve having to resize the document in an image editor to make sure it fits prop­erly. There’s no way to adjust the opacity of the background image, either.

Another advantage of Numbers’ approach becomes clear when you want to print the spreadsheet. Background images in Excel don’t print, which is understandable in a way: if you’re printing a spreadsheet on a standard office printer, the background image might unnecessarily clash with the content data. But Excel doesn’t compensate for the colour of the foreground text, so if you added a dark background image underneath cells with white text, Excel will simply print out what appears to be a blank page. With Numbers, you don’t have that problem: background images will print out alongside other data in the table, and can also be copied into other iWork documents.

Instant impact

Background images can help add impact to otherwise dry numbers. Here, gridlines between the cells have been removed

Background check

A background image has been placed behind this table as a separate element to allow precise positioning of the table relative to the image

Cell mates

This table also uses background images - the small flags - applied to individual cells

Do it in tile

A small tiling background element, originally designed for a web page, will also work superbly as a backdrop for iWork tables

Table premise

Excel’s background image feature suffers from weaknesses, including automatic tiling, inability to adjust transparency and the fact that you can’t print the background image