Customizing Table Cells—433

Table Title

To add a header title to the top of a table object, you should select Proc/Title... from the table menu, or you may click on the Title button on the toolbar. EViews will display a dialog prompting you to enter your title. When you enter text in this dialog, EViews displays a header title at the top center of the table. Note that the table title is different from the table name, which provides the object name for the table in the workfile.

To remove the table title, display the title dialog, then delete the existing title.

Gridlines

To toggle on or off the grid marking the cells in the table object, click on the Grid+/– button on the table toolbar, or select Proc/Grid +/- from the main table menu.

Resizing Columns and Rows

Column widths may easily be resized in both table views and in table objects. Simply place your cursor over the separator lines in the column header. When the cursor changes to the two-sided arrow, click and drag the column separator until the column is the desired size. If you wish to resize more than one column to the same size, first select the columns you wish to resize, then drag a single column separator to the desired size. When you release the mouse button, all of the columns will be resized to the specified size.

Row heights may only be resized in table objects. Place your cursor over the separator lines in the row header and drag the separator until the row is the desired height. If you wish to resize more than one row, first select the rows you wish to resize, then drag a separator to the desired size. All of the rows will be resized to the specified size.

Double clicking a column/row edge in the header will resize the row or column to the minimum height or width required so that all of the data in that row or column is visible.

Customizing Table Cells

EViews provides considerable control over the appearance of table cells, allowing you to specify content formatting, justification, font face, size, and color, cell background color and borders. Cell merging and annotation are also supported.

Cell Formatting

You may select individual cells, ranges of cells, or the entire table, and apply various formatting tools to your selection. To format the contents of a set of cells, first make certain that the table is in edit mode. Next, select a cell region, then click on CellFmt in the toolbar, or right mouse click within the selected cell region and select Cell Format.... EViews will open the Table Options dialog containing three tabs: Format, Font/Color, and Borders/Lines.

Customizing Table Cells—435

Borders and Lines

The last tab, labeled Borders/Lines is used to specify borders and lines for the selected table cells.

Simply click on any of the Presets or Border buttons to turn on or off the drawing of borders for the selected cells, as depicted on the button. As you turn on and off border lines, both the buttons and the display on the right will change to reflect the current state of your selections. Note also that there is a checkbox allowing you to draw double horizontal lines through the selected cells.

It is worth noting that the appearance of the Borders/Lines page will differ slightly depending on whether your current selec-

tion contains a single cell or more than one row or column of cells. In this example, we see the dialog for a selection consisting of multiple rows and columns. There are three sets of buttons in the Border section for toggling both the row and column borders. The first and last buttons correspond to the outer borders, and the second button is used to set the between cell inner border.

If there were a single column in the selection region, the Border display would only show a single column of “Cell Data”, and would have only two buttons for modifying the outer vertical cell borders. Similarly, if there were a single row of cells, there would be a single row of “Cell Data”, and two buttons for modifying the outer horizontal cell borders.

Cell Annotation

Each cell of a table object is capable of containing a comment. Comments may be used to make notes on the contents of a cell without changing the appearance of the table, since they are hidden until the mouse cursor is placed over a cell containing a comment.

To add a comment, select the cell that is to contain the comment, then right mouse click and select Insert Comment... to open the Insert Cell Comment dialog. Enter the text for your comment, then click OK. To delete an existing comment, just remove the comment string from the dialog.