It’s an easy job to remove table borders in your Word document.

First of all select your table: place the cursor in a table cell and then click the Layout tab (in the Table Tools contextual tab)> Next, click Select > Select Table.

Now that the entire table is selected, we can remove its boders. Click to the Design tab and click the down arrow to the right of the Borders button, in the Table Styles group. Make sure you click the down arrow and not the body of the button: clicking the main button area simply removes or adds the last border element used by this button. Word displays the last border element used on the button itself, so that’s helpful.

When you click the Borders down arrow, select the No Border option.

Voila – no borders. Don’t forget to select the table befor removing its borders. If you only put the cursor into a table cell and then remove borders, they are removed from that cell only. The rest of the table will keep its borders.

Imagine that we have a table full of text and that we want to keep the text but get rid of the table. We could just copy the text out of the table and paste it into a program like notepad, before copying it back to our document once the table has been deleted. The problem with doing this, however, is that we will lose any formatting that has been applied to the text. If the document was created by someone else, who knows what weird formatting they applied!

Fortunately for us, there happens to be a magic solution in Microsoft Word that we can use.

Select the table in your document and you should see the Table Tools contextual tab appear with the Design and Layout tabs within.

You can select the table simply by placing the cursor inside one of the cells.

Now click to the Layout tab within the Table Tools tab and then click on the Convert to Text button.

The Convert Table to Text window will display, giving us choices about how we want to separate the text in each cell. The best choice is often Paragraph marks, as shown in the image below, but you will have to decide what’s best for your unique situation.

Taking the Paragraph marks option will display each table cell’s text as a new paragraph.