Five table tricks to increase your InDesign productivity

Using tables is a great way to organize your data and present it to your reader in an easily viewable fashion. But tables can stump even the advanced InDesign user. Implement these five tips to skate around table woes and keep yourself moving smoothly along your layouts.

Table trick #1: Rearrange table rows
Perhaps a Move Row or Move Column feature will appear in a future version of InDesign, but for now, when you want to rearrange your table components, you’re left to do it the down-and-dirty way: cutting and pasting.

If you’ve ever cut and pasted a table row or cell, you might be groaning now remembering some of the oddities that occurred when you pasted your row to its new location. Sometimes folks inadvertently paste rows into cells by having cell content selected when they paste, instead of having the cell itself selected.

Use the following guidelines to cut and paste table rows — and note that these steps will work for columns as well.

To cut and paste rows:

1. Select the Type tool.
2. Hover the cursor to the left of the row you wish to cut until you see the right-pointing arrow, and then click to highlight the row.
3. Press [Ctrl]X to cut the row contents.
4. Place the cursor in the row above where you want to insert a new row and choose Table > Insert Row.
5. Select the Below radio button in the Insert Row dialog box and click OK.
6. Highlight the new row that you wish to paste the content into, or just highlight the complete first cell in that row. (Make sure that you select the entire cell.)
7. Press [Ctrl]V to paste the content into the new row, and then press [Shift][Ctrl]A to deselect all.

Tip: With your cursor inside a cell, press [Esc] to toggle between selecting a cell or selecting the cell text.

Table trick #2: Tab inside a table
If you press the [Tab] key while your cursor is inside a table cell, the cursor jumps to the next column. So how do you insert a tab into a table cell? Well, as with most functions, there’s more than one way to do the same thing in InDesign, so we’ll show you two ways to do this task.

To tab inside a table, place the cursor where you want to insert a tab. Then select Type > Insert Special Character > Other > Tab. InDesign inserts a tab where your cursor was!

The second way is of course a little easier: press [Alt][Tab] to insert a tab where your cursor is.

So why would you use the first method? Well, if you have one hand on your java and need to do everything with your mouse hand, you’ll benefit from knowing how to do it via menu options!

Either way, once you insert tabs into table cells, choose Type > Tabs to display the Tabs panel and edit your tab stop or alignments and insert tab leaders as necessary.

Table trick # 3: Align table text without tab stops
Did you know you can align table text to certain characters even if you don’t have any tab stops in your tables? So, for example, if you have a table with monetary values and you want to align the text at the decimal point, it’s possible to do this without inserting a single tab stop.

To align text without tab stops:

1. Choose Type > Tabs to display the Tabs panel.
2. Select the table rows you wish to align.
3. Click the Decimal Align tab stop.
4. Click anywhere in the ruler to set the text alignment.
5. Click and drag the tab stop to adjust your text location, and then press [Shift][Ctrl]A to deselect all.

Table trick #4: Add cell padding
Anyone who’s streamlined over to print design from web design probably gets frustrated that InDesign doesn’t offer tables with the same padding options that HTML does. But that doesn’t mean you can’t trick your tables a little to mimic the same kind of padding you’d get in the web world.

To mimic web-table cell padding:

1. Select the Type tool and highlight your table cells.
2. Choose Table > Cell Options > Text to open the Cell Options dialog box.
3. Increase the Cell Insets. We set the Cell Insets to 1p4.
4. Click on the Strokes And Fills tab, increase the weight, and change the line type. For our example, we set the weight to 6 pt and selected Thick Thin from the Type pop-up menu.
   

Table trick #5: Speed it up
This last trick is actually a multitude of tricks: Keyboard shortcuts!
One of the best ways to become more efficient using InDesign tables, other than using them frequently, is to learn the keyboard shortcuts. First, insert your cursor into a table cell, and then use the shortcuts shown in Table A to help you build and navigate your InDesign tables easily.

Related Courses

• • InDesign CS4 - Level 1
• • InDesign CS3 - Level 1
• • InDesign CS3 - Level 2

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