See Wendy Chart

I’ve not made much knitting progress so far this week, so I thought I’d share with you how I create a knitting chart in Microsoft Word.

As an example, I’ll create a chart template for a sock, because that’s what I do most.

My socks are often 66 stitches around for a size medium, so I will be making a chart the encompasses 33 stitches — half the circumference of the sock.

I’m using Word 2003 for the PC for this demo, but it’s pretty much the same in newer versions (and the MAC version) as well.

Start Word with a new document, and from the Table menu, select “Insert Table.”

I want 33 stitches across and 10 rows, so I set the dimensions at 34 and 11. The extras are so I can insert stitch and row numbers. I set my column width to .18″ because from trial and error I know this will work for a chart of u to about 40 stitches that will fit nicely on a letter-sized page.

Here is your resulting table in your Word document:

Click on the little box with the plus sign in the upper left corner to select the table, and from the Table menu, select “Table Properties.”

Make your row height .18″ and specify “exactly.”

Click on “OK.”

Open “Table Properties” again and select the “Cell” tab, and choose “Center” for the vertical alignment. I discovered that I need to click “OK” in every tab (and that closes the menu) and then re-open the menu in order to save all my changes.

In the “Cell” tab, click the “Options” button in the bottom right corner.

Uncheck the “Same as the whole table” option and set all the cell margins to “0.” Click on “OK,” then click on “OK” on the “Cell” tab to close the menu.

You should now have a table with perfectly square cells.

Next, we want to remove the borders for the first row and the last column on the right, because these are where we are going to put the numbers for the stitches and rows, so they are not part of the chart.

Select the table again and choose “Table Properties” again from the Table Menu. Click on the “Borders and Shading” button at the bottom of the menu.

In the resulting menu, click on “None” to remove all borders and click “OK.”

Now using your mouse cursor, highlight all of the table except the bottom row and the righthand column:

Go back into the Borders and Shading Menu and this time select “All” for the borders. You now have a table that looks like this:

Now you need to set the font for the cells. Highlight the bordered cells, and from your font list choose your knitting symbol font (that you have conveniently already installed — see my post from a couple of days ago.) Set the font size at 8 point, bold. Set the horizontal alignment to centered. Then highlight the bottom row, and set the font to Arial Narrow, size 8, normal, and set the horizontal alignment to centered. Do the same for the righthand column. Once you have inserted your numbers for stitches and rows, your table looks like this:

At this point you can save your table as a template because you’ve got all the settings the way you want. You can easily add or delete rows and columns to this base table to make different size charts.

Here’s a chart with a bunch of knitting symbols I threw in as an example:

When you print it from Word (or create a pdf from it), the greyed-out lines around the numbers do not print, so you get a nice clean-looking chart.

There are a number of different ways you can go about creating a table in Word, and of course you can vary the size of the cells, and use bold or colored lines to delineate pattern repeats, etc. But this is a quick demo of how I do it. I hope it’s been helpful.

Lucy sez:

“It didn’t do a thing for me.”