I watched my colleague Alun Dear laboriously make a bond energy table from scratch, with column headings centralised in bold but the bonds justified left. I realised that every time he made a table for one of his wonderful resources he had to go through the same process every time. ‘Why don’t you just save your table in Building Blocks like this?’ I asked. ‘As long as you can remember what you called your table, all you have to do is type its name then press F3 and the name changes to the table, formatted and complete with all the bond energies. Do the same for electrode potential, subatomic particles, etc. You can have any table you want at the click of a button.’ Building Blocks can also be used to quickly add text or diagrams or any combination of text, diagrams and tables as described here.
(Use the macro here to make a nice electrode potential table. All of the equilibrium signs are underneath each other since they are in their own invisible column without borders.)
- Select the entire table:
2. Press Alt+F3 (or Alt+Fn+F3). Word displays the Create New Building Block dialog box:
3. Replace the contents of the Name field with the name you want to use for your table.
4. Click on OK.
5. When you later want to use the table, simply type the name you specified in step 3 and press the F3 key (or Fn+F3). The table will be inserted in the place of the table name.
Chemistry Word VBA macros 