Tables
Tables are the most common way business professionals display tabular data, which is to say, data that is best understood in terms of columns and rows. The reason for the popularity of tables in the business world is that they are very easy to add to a document by simply copying and pasting from a spreadsheet program. The problem with tables, however, is that few people enjoy looking at bland grids of words and numbers.
The general approach to making tables more attractive is to remove anything that can be removed, which in practice usually means removing unnecessary data and distracting grid lines. This will have the effect of making the data more prominent and therefore easier to see and understand, as well as simplifying your table by removing visual clutter.
Removing unnecessary data requires omitting anything that your audience would find irrelevant, or that would distract your audience from important information.
For example, let's say you were a clothing retailer, and in your year-end report, you wanted a table displaying garment sales for the year. For each column, you might have garment name, color, size, fabric, designer, number of items sold, the cost per item, and the sales total. If you were presenting this table of data to a group of people only interested in the revenue generated, you could easily omit color, size, fabric, and designer. If you were presenting this data to a group of people in charge of store inventories, you might omit the number of items sold, and the cost per item.
Removing distracting grid lines starts with the understanding that even without lines separating columns and rows, it can still be very easy for people to distinguish each column, each row, and each cell - a cell being the intersection of a row and a column that contains data. When we remove grid lines, the remaining whitespace created by the space between columns and rows works to create the familiar table structure.
However, if after you remove all the grid lines, it becomes difficult to distinguish columns and rows, there are several things you can try:
First, try increasing the spacing between each column and each row, as this will create more whitespace to frame the table and make each cell stand out more clearly. Note that slightly reducing the size of the text also has the effect of increasing whitespace.
Next, consider using faint background colors for alternating rows, as people tend to have a harder time understanding data in tables left to right than they do top to bottom.
Finally, if after increasing whitespace and adding faint background coloring, the table's rows and columns are still difficult to distinguish, only then should you gradually add back faint horizontal lines between each row, perhaps even using a dashed or dotted line so as to reduce the chance that the line creates distracting visual clutter.
An exception to removing row lines is the table header - meaning the very first row that contains the column labels - which may benefit from a line or background color that visually separates the header from the rest of the table.
Once we have made a table that is as simple as possible - but no simpler - we can now think about what we might add to make the table more attractive, while also making it easier for people to understand the information it contains.
One of the first areas of improvement is to make sure that columns with words are left-aligned, and that columns with numbers are right-aligned. Further, columns with numbers often benefit from monospaced typefaces - which is to say fonts where each character is the same width - such as Courier, or Consolas, as this will line up each number in columns, making them look much neater and often making them easier to read.
If you have columns that represent positive or negative numbers, you might consider making the background of cells with positive numbers a shade of green, and the background of cells with negative numbers a shade of red. This will allow people to tell positive and negative numbers apart more easily than if they had to look for the minus sign preceding the negative numbers. This same approach can be used anytime you want to represent upwards or downwards trends.
When displaying dates, you should use a format that is the easiest for your audience to understand, which may not always be using the standard 2-digit number for month and day, and a 4-digit number for year. For example, instead of 11/06/2025, you might use the abbreviation for November - N-O-V - instead of 11, as well as use 6th - with a "th" - instead of 06.
If a particular column or row is important, consider giving the column or row a distinct background color, or using a bold font for the content in the column or row. This technique can also be used for individual cells that are important, even if they are scattered throughout the table.
If you are able to replace a value with an icon, you may consider doing so, as icons tend to be much more visually appealing than numbers or text. For example, if you had a column of average user ratings for a product on a 5-point scale, instead of using numbers you might use star icons to represent the rating.
If you have a column of numbers that are relative to one another, as would be in the case of percentages where the sum of all percentages in a column would be 100%, you might consider including a horizontal bar whose width corresponds to the percentage. In this way, your table would also serve the purpose of a bar chart.
Whatever combination of techniques you use to make your tables more attractive, never forget that the purpose of a table is to help your audience find and understand the data it contains. If ever you are stuck in deciding if your table should be more attractive or if it should be more practical, for professional business documents and presentations, always err on the side of practicality.