From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Formatting cells - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Formatting cells

“

- [Instructor] In the last movie, we explored formatting a whole table in this movie. We'll take it a step further and look at both formatting the data inside the cells and then the cells. Let's start by formatting the text inside these cells. Up here at the top in the header, I'll double click to switch to the type tool and place the cursor inside that cell. Then let's zoom into 200% by pressing command or control two. By the way, little trick, the escape key on your keyboard toggles back and forth between selecting the text and the cell itself. There's the cell, there's the text inside the cell. That's kind of helpful. Anyway, when you select one or more cells, you can change the format in all of them at the same time. For example, I'm going to select this entire row. Now, I could change the font in the control panel or the properties panel, but actually, you know it's going to take too long to format this manually. So instead, let's just apply a paragraph style, which I've already made over here in the paragraph styles panel. In fact, I want to select all the cells in the table, and I can do that by going to the table menu, coming down to the select sub menu, and then choosing table. Now, inside my paragraph styles panel, I'm going to scroll down until I find my folder called table. I'll open that and then I'll apply the table content paragraph style. That looks good. Now I'm going to go back and select just the first row that header row, and I'll apply a different paragraph style to that. The table header style. By the way, if the formatting doesn't change the way you expected, there may be some local or manual formatting in those cells that often happens. In that case, you'll see a plus sign show up next to the paragraph style name, and you can remove all of that formatting by clicking the remove overrides button at the bottom of the panel. That can be really helpful, but in this case, the table is starting to come together, except that header looks like it disappeared, and that's just because the paragraph style set the color to white. So I need to change the background color of the cells, which I can do in the swatches panel or the properties panel, or up here in the control panel. I'll set this to this brown color. Now it's kind of annoying because we can't actually see that brown color until we click off of it because those were selected, but there you go. That looks pretty good. Now I want to turn our attention to the strokes. I like these little black strokes between the columns, but not up here in the header. So how do we get rid of those? Once again, let's select this row. And now you need to pay attention to this weird looking icon up here in the control panel. When it comes to formatting tables, it's really important that you understand what this icon represents. Each of these blue lines represents one of the strokes inside the current selection of cells. So the bottom line and the top line represent the bottommost and the topmost lines in the selection, not the whole table, just the selection. Same thing with the left and right lines inside this icon. Those represent the leftmost and rightmost column strokes inside the selection. And this line in the middle of the icon that represents all the middle strokes. So if you want to change the strokes of each of those columns, you need to turn off all these blue lines simply by clicking once on them. Now I'll turn on the stroke in the middle. To change those strokes up there, I'll simply change the stroke color to none. So there the column strokes went away. Now I'm going to change this icon to target just the bottom stroke. And this one also, I'll change to none. There's just one more thing that's bugging me here, and that is all the text is at the top of the cell. I'm going to align this to the bottom by clicking this button over here in the control panel. Okay, let's click out here and you can see that all of those strokes are gone. Let's just do a couple more things to fine tune this table. I'd like there to be more space around the text. So once again, let's go up to the table menu and select all the cells. Now, I'll go up to the table menu and choose from the sell option sub menu text. This cell options dialog box gives you all kinds of control over each cell that you've selected. For example, you could change the insets. That is how far the text is going to sit from the edge of the cell. I'll type eight points and then press the tab key, and you can see that they all update because this link icon is turned on. Great, I'll click okay. Then I'll click over here to deselect those cells. And that looks good except there's a red dot here. What's that about? Well, the red dot is the same as an overset marker. It means that text cannot fit inside that cell. So I'm going to change the width of this column just a little bit. And there you go. That looks much better. I'll click out here to deselect everything, press command option zero or CTR alt zero to fit the whole spread of the window, and then press the W key to go into preview mode. Wow. You know, it's amazing. Remember how this was just all raw data just a few movies ago? This table has really come a long way.

Contents