How to Format a Table in a Book (Ebook, Print and DOCX)

Most self-publishing advice assumes a book is wall-to-wall prose, so the moment you need an actual table, the tools fall quiet. Nonfiction authors hit this constantly: a comparison of options, a pricing grid, a set of specifications, a short reference chart. The content is a table. The question is how to get one into a book without it falling apart the moment someone opens it on a phone.

Approach 1: Plain text with dashes or tabs

The low-effort option is to fake a table with spaces, tabs, or a row of dashes between columns. It works, sort of, in a fixed-width print layout where every line is the same width. It falls apart completely in an ebook, because reflowable text has no fixed line width: the columns you lined up by hand simply don't line up on a different screen, a different font, or a different text size. Readers are left trying to work out which number belongs to which label.

Approach 2: A screenshot of a table

The next instinct is often to build the table in a spreadsheet or word processor, then drop in a screenshot. This solves the alignment problem and creates several new ones. The image looks blurry on a high-resolution screen, it doesn't reflow or resize with the reader's own font settings, it fails basic accessibility checks because the words in it aren't real text, and a wide table shrunk to fit a narrow ebook page can become unreadable. It can also be awkward at the print stage, where image resolution and page width both matter.

Approach 3: A real table (the one that works everywhere)

The option that actually holds up is a genuine table, built with rows and columns the format itself understands, the same idea as a table in a web page or a word processor document rather than a picture of one. Built this way, a table reflows sensibly in an ebook, keeps its structure when printed, and reads correctly to accessibility tools and screen readers.

Getting a table right

A few habits make the difference between a table that works and one that fights the reader. Keep the column count low: a table with two or three columns survives almost anywhere, while one with eight or nine is fragile on a phone screen or an older ereader, however it's built. Use a header row when the first row is a label rather than data, so it's visually distinct from the rows beneath it. Keep cell text short, since a table cell is not the place for a full sentence. And decide column alignment deliberately: numbers usually read better right-aligned, while names and short labels sit more naturally left-aligned.

Whatever you build the table in, check it on a small ebook screen as well as on your own monitor. A table that looks perfectly sensible at full desktop width can crowd badly once it's squeezed onto a phone.

How Koberger formats tables

Koberger has a built-in table block for exactly this. You add rows and columns up to six wide, turn a header row on or off, and set each column's alignment, and Koberger renders it as a real table rather than an image, in four looks (shaded, lined, striped, or fully gridded) that pick up your book's own colours rather than looking bolted on. It exports cleanly to validated EPUB, print-ready PDF, and DOCX from the same table, and if you build one wide enough to risk breaking on a phone or an older Kindle, Koberger flags it before you export so you can catch it early.

Vellum, for comparison, has no way to add a table at all, checked against its own help documentation. If your book needs even one, that rules Vellum out regardless of anything else it does well.

You can add a table to your book for free and preview it on ebook and print devices before you export anything, then compare the whole picture in our roundup of the best book formatting software.