How to make a table in InDesign
Learn how to make a table in InDesign to display tabular data.
Published
[train simple AUTHORIZED Training Center] [This is an excerpt from trainsimple.com's InDesign CC Fundamentals] >> I'm working with the document called tables.indd which is available inside your chapter eight folder.
What I wanna talk about now is how you can go about inserting tables into your InDesign documents.
And obviously tables become important when you have tabular information that you need to display within your publication.
One thing that you'll notice is I have my hidden characters visible.
If you don't have your hidden characters visible, you can go to the Type menu and under the Type menu, there'll be a command down at the bottom that reads Show Hidden Characters.
You wanna be able to view them so you can see exactly what's going on within this InDesign document.
When you're working with the text frame, at the end of the text frame there's something called an end of story marker and that's what this pound sign is here, letting you know that's the end of the story within this text frame.
I bring this up because it's important to understand that if you're going to insert a table within an InDesign document, ultimately, you have to insert it within a text frame.
So let's go ahead and look at how we can insert a table by placing one inside this text frame over here on the right.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and double click so I get a blinking cursor then I'm gonna go to the table menu and under the table menu you can select Insert Table.
That's gonna open up the Insert Table dialog box, and this really establishes a starting point for your table.
You can always modify certain aspects of your table after the fact.
So what we want to do is insert a certain number of body rows and columns.
I'm gonna type in five here for body rows, I already have that typed in, so I'll leave that there, and I'll have three columns.
In terms of header rows, and footer rows, and table styles, those are things that we'll talk about a little bit later on in this chapter.
For now I'm gonna go ahead and click OK, once you click OK, you'll notice the tables inserted into the text frame.
And you'll notice that each cell is essentially treated as its own individual text frame, as you see these pound signs indicating the end of the story within each of those cells.
So I can go ahead and type text into any one of these cells if I want to.
And you can move from cell to cell by pressing the Tab key on your keyboard.
You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move between cells.
Shift + Tab will go to the previous cell.
So if I have a blinking cursor here inside of this cell and I press Shift + Tab, I'm gonna go back to the previous cell.
If you wanna add a new row, you can do that, it's fairly easy, all you have to do is have a blinking cursor inside the last cell of the table, press the Tab key and InDesign will generate that new row.
Additionally, there's some control that's available to you by using the table panel.
To access the table panel, you can go to the Window menu and under the Window menu, you can select Type & Tables and from there you can choose Table.
And there's a lot of options in here, and again we'll get to those as we progress through the chapter.
But for right now, up towards the top, you'll notice, you can specify the number of rows for the table and the number of columns.
And, of course, I have this information because I have a blinking cursor inside of the table, so InDesign knows that I'm talking about this specific table.
I'm gonna go ahead and increase the number of rows, I'll go ahead and type in something like 15.
I'm gonna tab away from it and you'll notice all the other rows are added to the table.
One other thing that I wanna point out...
I'll go ahead and close the table panel for now.
I'll scroll down, I'm gonna decrease the height of this text frame.
So I'll come over and highlight the selection tool or you can press the Esc key on your keyboard, if you have a blinking cursor somewhere within the text frame.
I'm go ahead and click in drag this up so the text frame is shorter.
And you'll notice we get an overset icon over here on the right indicating that there's more text information within this text frame.
One thing that you can do is thread your tables between text frames.
If I click this plus sign and get the loaded text icon, I can click and drag out a new text frame, and you'll notice that the table continues on within this new text frame.
I don't wanna do that ultimately, I just wanted to point out that, that is a possibility.
I'll go ahead and undo that Command + Z or Control + Z on Windows, and I'm going to escape out of the loaded text cursor.
I'm just gonna go ahead and increase the height of the text frame again so we can see the entire table.
Another way to create a table inside of InDesign is to convert an existing text structure into a table.
Here you'll notice we have several different elements within this text frame.
And each of these elements are separated out by paragraphs, and I can see that because I have my hidden characters visible.
If I go ahead and select all those elements...
Oops!
I'll go ahead and undo that, that's not what I wanted to do, I'll go ahead and double click and click and drag to select each of these elements.
With each of these elements selected, I'll go to the Table menu and under the Table menu you'll notice that there is an option to Convert Text to Table.
And that's gonna open up a dialogue box, and in this case, we really don't have to worry about a column separator because we don't have columns of information.
If maybe tabbed out and inserted some information then we could break this into separate columns but we didn't do that, we only have each of these individual paragraphs.
So our only concern right now is the row separator, and in this case the row separator will be a paragraph character.
Notice that there are several different options in each of these menus.
Once you click OK, you'll notice the table is generated.
One other thing I want to point out, if you do have a table, you always have the option to come back to the Table menu and convert the table back to text.
And something else I wanna show you, if your text frame...
I'm go ahead and press Escape to deselect the table, notice the text frame is selected, I'm just going to decrease the width of it.
Notice that you don't get an overset icon here in the text frame.
The table just exceeds beyond the overall width of the text frame, that's just how InDesign handles it.
It's still part of the text frame but if it is wider than the text frame then InDesign will render it that way but it doesn't affect the text frame itself.
And remember, this is part of the text frame.
So if you had a blinking cursor in front of this table... and I can do that by double clicking and then pressing the left arrow key, if you press Enter or Return to add a paragraph you could add text above it and you also have the opportunity to add text below it.
If I go ahead and get a cursor underneath this table, I can add text below as well.
So it's just part of the text frame itself, you can add text anywhere that you want and it just flows within that text frame.
So this is just a quick intro in terms of how you go about inserting tables into your InDesign documents.
What we'll do over the next couple of movies is look at how we can configure these tables further to ultimately get the look that we need for our layouts and designs. [train simple Affordable and comprehensive technology training] [AUTHORIZED Training Center www.trainsimple.com]
Contributor
Matthew Pizzi
