In general, it is recommended that tables simply use Wikipedia's default formatting. In some circumstances, however, you may need to apply some more complicated formatting using CSS. The appearance of each cell can be controlled by adding style=" " | before the cell's contents. CSS formatting is added to headings and captions in the same way.
Any CSS attributes can be added in the style=" " |.
Most commonly used attributes
Property
Meaning
Example
background
back ground fill
background:yellow
color
text colour
color:blue
width
cell width
width:100px
border-width
border width
border-width:3px
text-align
Text alignment within cell
text-align:center
As an example, here's an example with some varied formatting added to specific cells
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Caption: some cells yellow.
|-
! Header1
! Header2
! Header3
|-
| style="background: yellow" | R1C1
| R1C2
| style="background: yellow" | R1C3
|-
| R2C1
| style="background: yellow" | R2C2
| R2C3
|}
Then it would produce this:
Caption: some cells yellow.
Header1
Header2
Header3
R1C1
R1C2
R1C3
R2C1
R2C2
R2C3
CSS attributes can be added to the whole table by editing the first line of the table using {| style=" " in the first line. Similarly, attributes can be added to a row using |- style=" " The example below would fill the whole table yellow.
{| class="wikitable" style="background: yellow"
All of these formatting options should be used sparingly. Tables in crazy colours are hard to read.
Hidden comments
In complicated tables, sometimes hidden comments can be useful to explain formatting. These hidden comments are only visible when editing the page, not when reading it normally. Comments can be added by placing them between <!-- and -->.
| R1C1 || R1C2 ||R1C3 <!-- Hidden comment to explain this row -->