A new staff member was recently recruited to build up the marketing department. Uma needs to add this new member to her database. Now, she's only recently created named ranges for all of her data, and she wants to make sure that they extend automatically whenever she adds a new entry. To do this, she is going to have to convert her range to a table. And fortunately this couldn't be easier. All she needs to do is click anywhere in her data. Navigate to the insert tab, click on table, confirm the dialog box. And within seconds we've created our table. Straight away we notice that things look a little bit different. First off, we can see that the formatting has changed, we have these blue and white banded rows. Auto filter buttons have been added at the top of each column, and we have a brand new ribbon tab called, Table Tools, Design. Now this is called the contextual ribbon tab and you will notice that as soon as I click outside of my table, it disappears. I click back into the table and there it is again. We can also see that our table has remembered our conditional formatting rules from earlier. So that's really good to know. Let's take a quick look at our ribbon. On the far left hand side, in the properties for the table, Excel has given our table a name, Table1. Now that doesn't mean terribly much to us and it certainly won't mean anything to us later down the track. So let's call it HR, for human resources database. Enter to commit. I will skip these next two groups for now. Let's have a closer look at the table style options. We can turn the header row on or off. I certainly want mine on and we can give the first column slightly more emphasis. We can turn our filter buttons on or off. I will leave them off for now because right now we don't need them. We will talk about the total row later on. But here's also the last column that we can highlight. And then we can turn off the banded rows and turn on banded columns. Now you could have both turned on but that doesn't make terribly much sense. So I think because this is such a large database, we will leave the banded rows on. Now lastly, we can choose from a large variety of table styles. You can hover over them and in the live preview you can see what your table will look like if you select this particular style. Now when you pay close attention though, you can see that our header row isn't changing. Now, can you guess why that is? Yes, I thought you might. We did previously format this, and so the table styles cannot take control of it. So what we'll do is we will select the row, go back to our Home tab, and clear the format. There. And now all that's left to do, let's go back to the Design tab. Choose from the table styles And I think we will go for this medium blue style. It fits well with the company. But it also has nice gray and white banded rows. Fantastic. Now I think the first column emphasis we don't really need here, so let's leave it like this. Fabulous. Now that was quick and easy. And because it was so much fun, let's do it one more time. We'll go to the 'stats' sheet and we go to our department range here. So, all we need to do, remember, is we need to click anywhere within the range and this time we are going to use a shortcut, CTRL+T. There's our Create Table dialog, we confirm that Excel has selected the correct range and that our table has headers. Click OK. And there we go. Again we can make some changes in the style options. We shall turn the filter buttons off again. And this time, because of the size of the table we will select the banded columns, and I do think it make sense to highlight the first column. There you go, now that is a very nice looking table. But you may wish not to use any of the table styles at all. You just want the functionality. What you can do is you can go over back to the Table styles menu and select clear. And it has now cleared all the table style, but the functionality of the table remains. So as you have seen, tables are quick to create and offer many benefits when it comes to organizing and formatting your data. In the next few videos, we will explore how tables will help Uma and you you be even more efficient and productive.