From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Creating a table - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Creating a table

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- [Instructor] 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. InDesign offers a number of features that make table making, well, not fun, but at least pretty tolerable, and sometimes even interesting. In this movie, I'm going to show you the essentials, just what you need to do 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 text frame. I've already made a text frame to insert my table, so let's place our text cursor in there by double clicking with the selection tool. Now, I'll go 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 this chapter. For now, I'll just click OK, and you can see that InDesign has inserted this table. It's a very basic table, but at least we can type some data into it and then press the tab key and type some more. Now, in general, 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 I want to go ahead and get rid of this table and start a new one. You can delete a table, just like you would delete text or an anchored object. If we click down here in the empty part of the text frame, you'll see that the text cursor is flashing after that table. In fact, I can just type some more text in here, and it adds it after the table. So to delete this table, we simply drag over all that text and then press the delete key on the keyboard. Okay, now let's bring in some real data. I'm going to open the file menu and choose place. Here in the exercise files folder, I'm going to grab this file called TableData.txt. Then I'll click open, and you'll see that all that data comes into the text frame. It's definitely not pretty. Oh, by the way, I should point out that InDesign can also import Excel documents, and if you do that, it'll show up as a table already, but in this case, we're going to turn this text into a table by selecting all of it. Press command-A or control-A on Windows, and then up here in the table menu, choose convert text to table. InDesign is going to ask you what's in between each row and column, and in this case, the columns are broken down by tabs and the rows by paragraphs, so I'm just going to leave this set to the default settings, and click OK. As you can see, we now have a table really quickly, but I do remember seeing just a moment ago, there was a lot more data than we can see in this table. So if you look in the lower right corner of the text frame, you'll see an overset mark. This text frame is overset. The table is too long to fit in here, so I'm going to go grab the selection tool and then make this table taller. You can see a little bit more data, but it's still overset, so let's thread it to a new frame by clicking the overset marker, coming over to the right side, and clicking. There you go. There's a continuation of the table. If you have a really long table, this could go on for pages. Now 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 texts can actually hang outside of a text frame. Now I'm going to be talking about how to change the size of a table by adjusting its rows and columns later on in this chapter, but for right now, I do want to point out that each one of these cells is kind of like its own text frame. So for example, I can double click in here to switch the type tool and just start typing. 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 to make it look better.

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