I 've had it with pages and tables...

It could be me and my ineptness, but I 've had it with pages and its formatting options for tables. My annoyances are as follows:

First of all I cannot understand when and how pages formats cell height. Sometimes I write text and cells autoexpand, most of the times they don't and this is a major nuisance. And I can't find how to manually expand the cell, and hence the content of the cell is appearing only partially. This also happens when you merge cells and copy content that is relatively small, then the table does not auto-adjust to make the cell height smaller, nor can I find how to make it smaller manually.

For example I have a table with four columns and every say 4-5 rows I want to merge cells and put a header there, say a date, the size of the merged cells, their height to be exact cannot be adjusted to me smaller to cater for the smaller content.

There are other annoyances too, but they don't come to mind now, I ll update as soon as I run into them again.

Any help or similar experiences will be much appreciated. Tables are really a rudimentary requirement of any word processor, surely apple can do better there, and surely one cannot use pages if simple tables are an onerous chore.

peace. blow45.

 

first of all many thanks for the reply, much appreciated. You can merge cells and it's fairly easy, but all the rest I described are an effing pain in the behind. I just hoped I was doing something wrong and someone had already found a way to just make cells adjust to text size automatically. Can numbers do that? Like you said, it's the extra $10 I am thinking about, why give apple money for a functionality they should have had there to begin with? Even if $10 will not break my bank.

And I agree with you about software dev. and apple. And they have to understand now that they are not anymore the underdog we were rooting for, they are a giant and it's inexcusable such basic functionality to go under the table. Just hire a software developer and have them work on pages for god's sake...anyway it's not the place to vent here, I respect others.

I wonder, surely there must be support for the pages app I bought to just contact them directly as I must...

Anyway, has anyone figured out a way to at least select cell height? What predetermines the size of the cell? How can you even make a table without that, or without it at least autosizing? It seems such a gross ommision I think I am doing something wrong here.

 

thanks so much for that, although -to no fault of your own of course- it took me about 15 mins to figure it out... I have to also say my bad, because apple does give instructions for this in their help pages, which I did not read... Having said that, since they ve done away with menus in the ipad interface (as they should have) one is apparently expected to keep looking at the help pages to find out about functionality that is not apparent from the user interface which is based on the principle tap everywhere until you get what you are looking for. In any case my bad.

peace, blow.