From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Formatting a table - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Formatting a table

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- [Instructor] Let's make this table look a tad bit better. The basic tool for formatting a table is the Table Options dialogue box, and you can get there by placing your text cursor anywhere inside the table. Then go to the Table menu and choose Table Options and then choose Table Setup. The Table Options dialogue box gives you a lot of control over your tables, but we're just going to look at the most important features here, like the table border in the middle. This lets us control what the border looks like around the outside edges of the table. Right now, it shows a one-point black stroke, but I want to change it to have no stroke. To do that, you can change the color to none. Okay, now let's go look at some of the other tabs along the top of the dialog box. For example, fills. This is the most fun. Let's change the Alternating Pattern pop-up menu here to, say, every other row. Now, we'll turn on the Preview check box at the bottom of the dialog box, and you can see the effect. Every other row is colorized. By default, it's set to 20% black, but I'm going to change that. Let's change the first color to this light gray. And I'll change the tint to something like 70%. The second color is going to be paper. Okay, now let's tackle the strokes. The strokes that go in between each of the rows and columns. The problem is that when I'm looking at the table right now, I'm just seeing blue lines. Those blue lines are not the strokes. Those are the frame edges that show where the rows are. So let's click OK, go to the View menu, and then down here in the Extras sub menu, I'm going to turn on Hide Frame Edges. This is great because now we just see the strokes themselves. By the way, those frame edges were blue because this frame is on a layer, and the layer is set to a blue color. All right, now, let's head back to the Table menu. Go back to Table Options and choose Table Setup. Let's go to the Row Strokes tab. That is, what do you want to have between every row in your table? Right now, we have a thick one-point black line, but in fact, I don't want to have any stroke in there. Now you'd think that InDesign would make it easy to just turn those off, but actually, you have to be a little sneaky. To do it, you should change the alternating pattern to every other row. And then you set the color of both of these to none. Now they all go away. Okay, now let's do the columns. In this case, I do want to have a stroke between each of them, but I want it to be thinner. So I'll change this to every other column and change this to, say, quarter point. That looks good. I'll click OK. So there's one more thing I'm noticing here. The first row of my table seems to be a header, but it only shows up on the left side of the page. I'd also like to see it over here on the right page. To do that, you need to put your cursor inside one of these cells or select the whole row. I'll do that by placing my cursor to the left of the row till I see that big, thick black arrow, and then click. Now, I'll head up to the Table menu, come down to the Convert Rows sub menu, and choose To Header. Now, I'll click out here to deselect that, and you can see that this header row shows up on both sides of the page. In fact, this could be a 50-page long table, and you'd still have that header at the top of every single page. Okay, this table is looking a lot better already, but there's more work to be done. The next step is to format the data in the cells and then to apply some custom formatting to individual cells.

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