From the course: InDesign: Typography

Table Styles and Cell Styles - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Typography

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Table Styles and Cell Styles

“

- [Instructor] If you've been following along with the course, I'm sure you've got the impression that I'm a big advocate for using styles. But when it comes to table and cell styles, there are some caveats that I have to mention. They are definitely worth using, but they don't get you the whole way there, and they are quite complicated to set up. I'm going to come to the second page in the document. Before, you saw me take this raw text and format the table manually, and that's fine. But if I've got lots of tables that look like this, it's going to save me time to make a table style. A table style, I'll come to the Styles fly out under the Window menu and choose Table Styles. A table style incorporates in it cell styles, and cell styles incorporate paragraph styles. So we have paragraph styles inside of the cell styles, cell styles inside of a table style. So this time, I'm going to select the text, convert the text to table, but I will do that applying a table style to it. I'll use this one, Alternating Column Fills. And you can see that'll get us most of the way there, but it won't do certain things. So what it has done, and if we take a look at the table style definition, it is applied the alternating fields. And in the General setup, to the Body Rows, it's applying a cell style called table body. The Footer Rows, the Right Column, Left Column, they're all the same. To the Header Row, it's applying a table style called table head, except it's not. We'll get to that in a moment. But let's now take a look at the cell styles. So I have one called table body, and all this is, really, it's saying that in the table body cell style, apply the table paragraph style to the content. And I have others, this table body, which we're going to see in a moment. And there's table left column, which I'm using over here on this other table so that it makes the text in the left column right-aligned. But for this one, everything is the same as the body, except for the header. Now, to activate the header, I need to select the first row, come to the Table menu, and then convert that first row to a header row. Then, the table head cell style is applied to it, but what it doesn't do, and what we need to do here is merge those cells together. And I need to merge the cells together for the second row as well. Also, what the table style won't do is it won't adjust the relative widths of the columns. So that's something that I'll just have to do manually the same way as I did before. I'm just going to make that first column wider, then select all the other columns, hold down the Shift key, drag that back so that they are all now narrower. But the first column, which I'm going to have to adjust again, is wide enough so that none of the station names need to run to two lines. So in conclusion, I'd say do use table and cell styles. Once you get used to them, they will save you time, but calibrate your expectations accordingly.

Contents