How can I provide dividers and control item alignment in a Grid?

Question

I make a Grid with multiple Rows and Columns.

I want to apply different types of Dividers and Alignment to that Grid.

If you can observe above picture,

1.First row Alignment is Left,and remaining all the rows Alignment is center.

2.in the second row only Dividers are appeared

I want like this,for this purpose I wrote a simple code but it was nor working

 Grid[{{Style["Life Alerts", Bold, 20], SpanFromLeft, SpanFromLeft}, 
       {Style["Alert", Bold, 15], Style["<>", Bold, 15], 
        Style["%Life", Bold, 15], 
        Style["OnDay", Bold, 15]
       },
       {Style["L1", Bold, 15], 
        Style["<", Bold, 15], Style["90", Bold, 15], 
        Style["0.35", Bold, 15]
       },
       {Style["L2", Bold, 15], 
        Style[">", Bold, 15], Style["90", Bold, 15], 
        Style["0.35", Bold, 15]
       },
       {Style["L3", Bold, 15], 
        Style[">", Bold, 15], 
        Style["90", Bold, 15], 
        Style["0.35", Bold, 15]
       }
      },
     Alignment -> {{Left}, Center}, Background -> {None, {Yellow}}, Frame -> True, 
   FrameStyle -> Directive[Thickness[4], Black], Spacings -> {1, 1}, 
   Dividers -> {{}, {True, True, True}}]

Already I seen documentation still I didn't get it

can anybody help me?

Answer 1

another way

  Grid[{
  {Item["life alerts",Frame->True, Background -> Green,Alignment -> Left], SpanFromLeft},
  {Item["Alert", Frame -> True], Item["% Life",Frame->True],Item["On day",Frame-> True]},
  {"L1", 98, .52},
  {"L2", 97, .77},
  {"L3", 95, 1.27}
  }, Alignment -> {Center}, Frame -> True]

This reference here http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/GridsRowsAndColumns.html

has good table to keep handy. Here is a copy of it.

Notice that Dividers only work on the whole grid at once. Not on specific rows/columns. So to do the above in another way, need to use Frame, not Dividers. Either way, I always had hard time with this, so you are not alone. I found the Item trick by accident one day when I was trying something, and I use it when needed for special lines like in this case. Item is an amazing function. I use it for another very important thing inside Manipulate.

You'll find Another useful function on this page to make it easy to add divider between rows written by Heike. I used it few times myself. It makes it very easy to add a line between rows.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8875970/any-trick-to-add-a-divider-inside-a-grid-between-rows-at-the-point-it-is-needed

Answer 2

If you want to style a grid it is better IMO to do this with Grid options and keep content and styling separate: Grid[content, options(styling)]. Wrapping data elements in Item is (manually) inefficient and soon becomes impractical as the size of the data grows. It is also inefficient/impractical to do this if you are generating data dynamically in some way. Therefore it is best to leave data as it is and use it directly as the first argument to Grid and then adjust your styling with the Grid options.

If you want a grid like in the image in your question then try these Grid options -- using your code with the second column removed (not sure why the second column is there).

Grid[{{Style["Life Alerts", Bold, 20], SpanFromLeft, 
   SpanFromLeft}, {Style["Alert", Bold, 15], Style["%Life", Bold, 15],
    Style["OnDay", Bold, 15]}, {Style["L1", Bold, 15], 
   Style["90", Bold, 15], 
   Style["0.35", Bold, 15]}, {Style["L2", Bold, 15], 
   Style["90", Bold, 15], 
   Style["0.35", Bold, 15]}, {Style["L3", Bold, 15], 
   Style["90", Bold, 15], Style["0.35", Bold, 15]}},

 (* options *) 
 Alignment -> {{Center, 1 -> Left}, Center}, 
 Background -> {None, {Green}}, 
 Frame -> {Automatic, Automatic, {{2, 1} -> Blue, {2, 3} -> True}}, 
 FrameStyle -> Directive[Thickness[4], Black], 
 Dividers -> {{1 -> True, -1 -> True}, {1 -> True, 2 -> Red, 
    3 -> Directive[AbsoluteThickness[1], Orange], -1 -> True}},
Spacings -> {1, 1}]

Note that I made a few departures with the styling so you could see how to make specific one off changes to divider styling. Also rather than wrap each element in an identical Style it would be better to set an ItemStyle (or BaseStyle, you could also add a BaseStyle choosing font and font size etc.):

Grid[{{"Life Alerts", SpanFromLeft, SpanFromLeft}, {"Alert", "%Life", 
   "OnDay"},
  {"L1", 98, .52}, {"L2", 97, .77}, {"L3", 95, 1.27},
  {"L4", 85, 3.21}, {"L5", 60, 6.23}},(*options*)
 Alignment -> {Center, Center, {{1, 1} -> Left}},
 Background -> {None, {Lighter[Green, 0.6]}}, 
 Frame -> {Automatic, Automatic, {{2, 1} -> True, {2, 3} -> True}}, 
 FrameStyle -> Directive[Thickness[4], Black], 
 Dividers -> {{1 -> True, -1 -> True}, {1 -> True, 2 -> True, 
    3 -> True, -1 -> True}},
 ItemStyle -> {Automatic, {Automatic, 1 -> Bold}},
 ItemSize -> 6,
 Spacings -> {1, 1}]

The advantage of this approach is that for large grids it is easier to maintain than wrapping elements in Item -- grid content is separate from the styling (which is controlled by the grid options).