Hey all!

I'm used to aligning things across columns by using tables. I do this because I find the "column" feature to be finicky, especially when I'm only doing 2-3 items.

However, I'm being told by a career center rep that because I'm using "hidden" tables to format my resume that a lot of parsers out there will not be able to read the document properly when uploaded.

I'm fine without using tables to align things. However, when I use "tab" it only seems to align segments of text that are consecutive across lines.

When I want to align something that acts as a sort of header, it will not align to the other headers.



As a result, when I look at my headers, half of which should be aligned left, and the other half which should be aligned right, there's a sort of awkward placement of items that depend on line length and tabs used.

I'd like to be able to have them align just as if I'd used a table.

I doubt you're using "hidden" tables to format your resume - just borderless tables. Any document parser worth the name should be able to parse tables. Sure you can use tabs to produce a tabular layout, but that is far harder to parse than a table! After all, a table can have multiple rows of text in a since cell; you can only simulate that with a tabular layout by having line-breaks and extra tabs that break up the text flow to the point it becomes a real challenge to parse correctly.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Well, yes. They're borderless, she simply referred to them as "hidden".

I'll go back to my "hidden tables" and look more closely to see if there are any parsers giving me trouble. Thanks!

If you get stuck, you could do the composition using tables, then use the 'Table to Text' function to convert them to a tabular text layout. Although you'll get a text structure that's basically the same as the original table's, you'll still have to deal with the line-wrap issues.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]