From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Creating a table - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

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Creating a table

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- [Expounder] One of the most difficult design challenges is representing a lot of data clearly. It's easy to throw a bunch of numbers and dates on a page but to make them readable, you typically need to format it all as a table. Now InDesign offers a number of features that make table making well not fun, but at least pretty tolerable and sometimes even interesting. My friend, Diane Burns has done a whole title on making cool looking tables here in the online training library. You should definitely check that out. But in the meantime, I'm going to show you the essentials. Just what you need to get up and running with tables quickly. Now the first thing you need to know about tables in InDesign, is that they're always anchored inside a text frame. Sometimes in the middle of a story, or sometimes as the only thing in the frame. Now I've already made a text frame to insert my table. So let's place our text cursor in there by double clicking, and then I'll head up to the Table Menu and choose, Insert Table. The Insert Table dialogue box lets you choose the number of rows and columns and also specifies header and footer rows. I'll talk about those later on in the chapter. For now, let's just go ahead and click OK. And you can see InDesign places the table into the frame. It's a very basic table, but at least we can type some data into it. I'll just type a few words and then hit the Tab key and I can type some more. Actually, I should point out that you don't have to make a text frame first, you can just choose Insert table from the Table Menu. In that case, InDesign would make a text frame for you and put the table into it. Either way works. In general, though, you're not going to be typing in the cells manually. Data will probably come from somewhere else like Word or Excel or some Database. So let's go ahead and get rid of this table and start with a new one. You can delete a table just like you would delete text or an anchored object. In fact, as I said, a table is anchored in the text. So if we click down here, in the empty part of the frame, you'll see that the text cursor is placed immediately after the table. In fact, I could just start typing some more gibberish here and you'll see that it adds it after the table. So to delete the table, we simply drag over it, and then press the Delete Key. Okay, now let's bring in some real data. I'm going to go to the File Menu and choose Place. Then you can choose the Table Data File here, from the Exercise Files folder and click Open. Now all that data came into the text frame. It's definitely not pretty. By the way, InDesign can also import Excel documents. And if you do that, it'll import as a table already. But in this case, we're going to turn this raw text into a table by selecting it. You can just press Command + A on the Mac or Ctrl + A on Windows. And now here in the Table Menu, choose Convert Text to Table. InDesign's going to ask you, what's in between each row and column? In this case, the columns are broken down by tabs and the rows by paragraphs. So we'll just leave this set to the default settings and click OK. As you can see, we now we have a table really quickly. But I remember seeing just a moment ago, there was a lot more data than we can see in this table. So if you look down in the lower right corner of the text frame, you'll see an overset mark. This text frame is now over set, the table is too long to fit in there. So I'm going to go grab the selection tool and make this text frame a little bit longer. You can see a little bit more data there, but it's still overset. So let's thread this to a new frame by clicking on that Overset Marker, come over here to the next page and clicking. InDesign makes a new text frame and automatically threads from one frame to the next. And now you can see the continuation of that table. If you have a really long table, this could go on for pages. The other thing I'm noticing here, and it's kind of interesting is that this table is wider than the text frame itself. This is one of the few instances in InDesign where things can actually hang outside of a text frame. I'm going to be talking about how to change the size of a table by adjusting as rows and columns later on in this chapter. But for right now, I just want to point out that each one of these cells is kind of like its own text frame. So you can switch to the Type Tool and click inside of here, simply by double clicking on it. Now you could edit the text inside that frame. Now I know this table isn't exactly pretty, but at least we now have a table to work with. In the next few movies, I'm going to explain how to adjust the rows and columns and then start formatting these cells.

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