The Excel table feature I rely on every day is buried in plain sight. Here's how I uncovered it

Published Oct 9, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT Tony Phillips is an experienced Microsoft Office user with a dual-honors degree in Linguistics and Hispanic Studies. Prior to starting with How-to Geek in January 2024, he worked as a document producer, data manager, and content creator for over ten years, and loves making spreadsheets and documents in his spare time. Tony is also an academic proofreader, experienced in reading, editing, and formatting over 3 million words of personal statements, resumes, reference letters, research proposals, and dissertations. Before joining How-To Geek, Tony formatted and wrote documents for legal firms, including contracts, Wills, and Powers of Attorney. Tony is obsessed with Microsoft Office! He will find any reason to create a spreadsheet, exploring ways to add complex formulas and discover new ways to make data tick. He also takes pride in producing Word documents that look the part. He has worked as a data manager in a secondary school in the UK and has years of experience in the classroom with Microsoft PowerPoint. He loves to encounter problems in Microsoft Office and use his expertise and legal-level training to find solutions. Outside of the Microsoft world, Tony is a keen dog owner and lover, football fan, astrophotographer, gardener, and golfer. Excel has a funny habit of giving you useful little tools and then making you work to find them. That can be frustrating, but you can fix a lot of Excel annoyances with a few small tweaks until it works the way you want. That's where I landed with table names. I wanted them to be easier to see, and it turns out Excel gives you a couple of ways to make that happen. That small change has made life far easier than I'd imagined. Table names matter more than Excel lets you think Why is something so useful so invisible? If you use Excel tables, one of the first things to do when you create one is give it a meaningful name. Structured references are much easier to read when your tables have meaningful names, and you can use the drop-down in the Name Box to jump straight to any table in the workbook. Meaningful names also make it easier to identify the right source when you're working with things like charts, PivotTables, and Power Query. To name a table, click anywhere inside it, open the Table Design tab, and use the Table Name field on the left. Microsoft is also rolling out a new option that lets you enter the name when you first create the table, so you may already see that field in the Create Table dialog. But once you've named your table, Excel doesn't make it particularly easy to see. In almost every other context, tables have visible titles or labels—think academic papers, textbooks, diagrams, reports, or instructions. You can look at a table and immediately see what it represents. Google Sheets takes a similar approach, displaying the table name directly above the table. Excel, meanwhile, tucks the name away: you have to click inside the table, find the Table Design tab, and look at the Table Name box. I've come up with two ways to keep table names in sight. And it's not a case of choosing one or the other: I use both in tandem. Method 1: Put the table name where you can always see it Add it to the Quick Access Toolbar The first solution takes literally 30 seconds and, for the most part, solves the problem. All you have to do is move the Table Name field somewhere you can see it all the time: the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT). This is ideal because it stays visible regardless of which ribbon tab you're using. To add it, click inside any table and open the Table Design tab. Right-click the Table Name text on the left and select Add to Quick Access Toolbar. Now, whenever you click inside a table, its name appears in the QAT. The box always shows the name of the currently selected table, so it also gives you a much quicker way to rename a table if you need to. Method 2: Make the table name sit on your worksheet One click is all it takes Sometimes you might want the table name visible on the worksheet itself, such as when you're building a dashboard or a worksheet someone else might need to understand without clicking around Excel's interface. This is absolutely possible, but it's slightly more involved than Method 1. If you search online, you might see a formula-based method that uses FORMULATEXT. If a cell contains a structured reference to the table, you can extract the table name from that formula and display it elsewhere. Even though this works, it's a cumbersome solution and requires you to have a suitable structured reference somewhere in the worksheet—which kind of defeats the point. Instead, you can add a tiny VBA macro to your PERSONAL.XLSB file and put it on the QAT. If this is your first time creating personal macros, you need to generate the workbook first: Open a blank Excel workbook and open the View tab. Click the Macros drop-down arrow, then select Record Macro. In the Store macro in drop-down menu, select Personal Macro Workbook, then click OK. Click the square Stop Recording button in the bottom-left corner of the Excel window. Excel creates PERSONAL.XLSB automatically, ready for your VBA code. Press Alt+F11 or click Developer > Visual Basic to open the VBA Editor, right-click VBAProject (PERSONAL.XLSB), choose Insert > Module, and open the new module. If you already created a Personal Macro Workbook, open it directly (Alt+F11) or click Developer > Visual Basic, then either create a new module in PERSONAL.XLSB (Insert > Module) or double-click the module containing your existing macros to display the code workspace on the right side. Then, enter the following VBA code. It checks the cells immediately below and to the right of the selected cell for a table, then writes that table's name in light-gray italic text into the selected cell. In other words, it lets you put the table name directly above or to the left of the table. I've deliberately used these directions because putting the name to the right or below the table leaves it with no room to expand, and the table structure will automatically "grab" the name you just added. Sub InsertTableName() Dim tbl As ListObject Dim target As Range Set target = ActiveCell On Error Resume Next Set tbl = target.Offset(1, 0).ListObject If tbl Is Nothing Then Set tbl = target.Offset(0, 1).ListObject On Error GoTo 0 If tbl Is Nothing Then MsgBox "No table found below or to the right of the selected cell.", _ vbInformation, "Table name" Exit Sub End If target.Value = tbl.Name target.Font.Color = RGB(128, 128, 128) target.Font.Italic = True End Sub Now, click Save to store the macro, then close the VBA window. If Excel asks you to save changes to your Personal Macro Workbook later, click Save, or the macro will disappear when you next open Excel. Lastly, add the new macro to your QAT: Right-click anywhere on the Excel ribbon and select Show Quick Access Toolbar if that option appears. If it doesn't, your QAT is already visible. Click the small drop-down arrow on the right side of the toolbar, then click More Commands. In the Choose commands from drop-down menu, select Macros. Select your new macro from the left column and click Add to move it to the toolbar list. Select the added macro in the right column, click Modify, and choose an icon that makes it easy to identify. Now, select the cell above or to the left of the table, click your new QAT button, and the table's name appears as text. There is one trade-off: the inserted name is static. If you rename the table later, the label on the worksheet won't change with it. That's probably a reasonable compromise because tables are rarely renamed once the workbook's structure has been established. That said, if you do rename a table, simply run the macro again. Make Excel work your way Once you start treating Excel's interface as something you can customize rather than something you simply have to accept, there are plenty of other tweaks worth making. Creating a custom Ribbon tab, for example, lets you put the Excel tools you use most exactly where you want them. You don't necessarily have to accept Excel as it comes out of the box.