Zebra striping is a technique that shades alternating rows of a table in different colors to make it easier to read. It helps the eye follow lines, remember information, and reduces visual overload. It’s commonly used in printed and electronic documents, and data management programs offer easy options to create zebra tables. Its usefulness is debated, but it’s still popular for its aesthetic benefits.
Zebra striping is a technique used to make data presented in tabular format more readable. When a table is zebra-striped, the alternating rows or rows are lightly shaded in different colors. The use of zebra stripes in printed documents is quite ancient, although it became particularly widespread in the mid-20th century, and is also common on the Internet and in electronic documents.
In a classic example of zebra striping, a bus table might be set up in columns representing stops, with rows representing times. If the bus company wanted to highlight times when buses stopped at particular locations, they could choose to create vertical zebra stripes, allowing users to easily track when the bus stopped at a particular location. In this case, the lines could be white or shaded, with the two options alternating.
There are several reasons why zebra stripes are supposed to make a document easier to read. First, striping makes it easier for the user’s eye to follow a line or line all the way through, acting as a kind of highlighter to draw the gaze along or down the table. Striping also makes it harder to lose track of information, as the eye remembers whether it should be looking at a shaded or plain set of information. Zebra striping can also be easier on the eyes, breaking up a table so that information doesn’t feel overwhelming.
You may hear zebra stripes called candy stripes or half shades, both references to the visual appearance of tables that have been zebra striped. Many data management programs that offer a tab option also allow users to create zebra stripes quickly and easily by choosing from a variety of shading and color options. Creating a zebra table online is a little more complicated, although there are various applications that perform this function.
There is some debate about how useful zebra striping actually is, but many people continue to use zebra striping for documents because they assume that even a small improvement in readability is a good thing, and because people are familiar with zebra striped. From an aesthetic point of view, zebra stripes also help to visually decompose the document, reducing the appearance of a huge block of material, which can be distracting and unpleasant to look at.
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