APA 7 Tables and Figures: What You Can Fix in Word, and What You Have to Fix at the Source
This week I spent two mornings inside one client's dissertation rebuilding Word styles, and most of that time went to two objects: Table 1 and Figure 1. Neither had anything wrong with its content. The data were sound and the analysis was sound. What sent them back was presentation — a bold title where an italic one belonged, vertical lines running down a table, and a figure floating free of its caption so the two could land on different pages.
I fix these every week, in nearly every file I open. So here is the whole thing, in the order I actually work through it. (The settings around them — margins, running head, line spacing, the table of contents — are in the APA 7 Word settings post.)
Start with the difference between the two
A table and a figure are not two versions of the same object, and the difference decides what you are able to fix and where you have to go to fix it.
A table is built out of Word. Rows, columns, borders, text — every part of it is live. You can change any of it from inside your document.
A figure is usually a picture. A chart pasted from Excel or SPSS, a model drawn in PowerPoint, a photograph, a diagram. Its axis labels, fonts, gridlines, shading, and colors are baked into the image. You cannot reach them from Word no matter how long you click.
That is why figure problems are expensive and table problems are not. If your reviewer says the axis labels on Figure 3 are too small to read, there is no fix inside your manuscript. You go back to whatever made the image, change it there, export it again, and replace it. If you no longer have that source file, you are rebuilding the figure from scratch.
Which produces the single most useful habit in this whole post: keep the source file for every figure, named to match — Figure 3.xlsx, not Book1 (3) final FINAL.xlsx. You will need it. Everyone needs it eventually.
The caption block is the same for both — and it is the most common error I see
Above the table or the figure, on its own line, flush left: the number, in bold. Table 1. Figure 3. No period.
On the next line, flush left: the title, in italic, in Title Case. Not bold. Brief, but explanatory enough that a reader who skipped your paragraph still knows what they are looking at.
Both lines double-spaced, like the rest of the manuscript.
That is it — and nearly every draft I open has it some other way. The number and title run together on one line. The title is bolded. The whole block is centered. The figure caption sits underneath the image, the way journals in some other disciplines set it. In APA 7 the number and the title go above, for both objects. Only the notes go below.
Tables: borders in three places, and nowhere else
Horizontal lines only. APA 7 asks for them in three places:
- across the top of the table;
- beneath the column headings — and under a spanner heading, across only the columns it spans;
- across the bottom.
No vertical lines anywhere. No box around every cell. You may add one horizontal rule above a totals row if it genuinely helps a reader, and that is the end of the list. Word's default table styles hand you the full grid, so this is something you take out rather than something you add.
Column headings are sentence case and not bold: Mean score, not Mean Score. Center each heading over its column. The stub — the leftmost column, the one naming your rows — stays left-aligned, along with its heading. Data columns are centered, or aligned on the decimal when they are numbers.
One more thing I remove constantly: blank paragraphs inside cells, used to fake row spacing. They look like spacing and behave like content. They break the moment the table reflows onto a new page, and they make row heights uneven as soon as anything above them changes. Set the spacing in the table's own properties instead.
Notes go below the table, in this order: the general note first, beginning with Note. — italic, then a period — where abbreviations get defined; then specific notes keyed with superscript lowercase letters; then probability notes. Include only the ones you actually need. A table with nothing to explain does not need a note.
Figures: get the image inline, and keep the legend inside it
Set the image In Line With Text, not floating or wrapped. A floating image is anchored to a paragraph you cannot see, and sooner or later it will slide onto a different page than its caption — usually the week you are assembling the final file. Center it. Scale it proportionally; never drag a corner into a shape the image was not.
If the figure has a legend — the key explaining symbols, line styles, or shading — it belongs within the borders of the figure, not off to one side, and its entries are in Title Case.
Everything else lives inside the image, which means it has to be right before you paste it in:
- text in a sans serif font, between 8 and 14 points, dark enough to read;
- axes labeled, with units of measurement given;
- plot symbols about the size of a lowercase letter in the labels;
- enough contrast to survive being printed in gray scale, plus a second cue besides color — a line style, a pattern, a direct label — so a reader with color-vision deficiency gets the same information;
- no decorative 3-D, and no gridlines unless they genuinely help someone compare values.
If any of that is wrong, fix it in the source file. Word cannot do it, and enlarging a blurry image only gives you a bigger blurry image.
Numbering and callouts: the part that gets caught at review
Tables and figures are numbered in the order they are first mentioned in your text — not the order you made them, and not the order they happen to sit in after you moved a section. Table 1 is the first table mentioned; Figure 1 is the first figure mentioned. They run as two separate sequences, and appendix items take the appendix scheme: Table A1, Figure B1.
Every one of them gets a callout in the text before it appears — As shown in Table 2…, (see Figure 4). “The table below” is not a callout; it is a description of a page layout that will not survive typesetting. And when you move a section, which you will, check that the numbers still run in order and that every callout still points where you think it does. This is where a late revision quietly breaks a chapter.
If you did not make it, the note has to say so
The item university stylists flag most often, and authors miss most often: a table or figure reproduced or adapted from another source needs a copyright attribution in its note, and often written permission from the rights holder.
If your table lays out four models from someone else's typology, or your figure is a framework you redrew from a published article, that is adapted material. The note names the source, the author, the year, and the copyright holder, and says whether it is reprinted or adapted with permission.
There is a quieter version of the same problem. If the title credits an author with a comparison the author never made — while your columns compare things that author did not compare — the table is your own synthesis. Title it for what it shows, and credit the sources in the note. Getting this wrong is not a formatting slip; it is the one item on this list with a legal dimension, and it is worth raising with your chair well before your deposit deadline.
The order I would work in
If you are staring at a chapter full of them right now:
- Fix the caption blocks first — number bold above, italic Title Case title below. It is fast, and it is most of the redline.
- Strip the vertical lines and the fake spacing out of the tables.
- Set every image inline and centered.
- Read each figure at 100% and write down what is wrong inside the image. That list goes back to the source files, not into Word.
- Walk the chapter for callouts and numbering last, once nothing else is going to move.
None of this makes your findings better. What it does is stop your formatting from taking attention your findings have earned — which is the whole reason the rules exist, and the reason a reviewer's eye lands on a bolded title before it ever reaches your results.
Warmly,
~Jennifer
And if you would rather work from examples than from rules, the APA 7 Tables & Figures Kit is nine tables and figures already built correctly, with a short guide — paste yours over the top of them. If you would rather hand the whole chapter to someone, that is what I do.