Adobe CS5.5 (v.7.5) Mac Upgrade NO 65103437 User Manual

Working with tables

You can easily create sophisticated tables 

in InDesign—making  

your own from scratch, converting imported text into tables, or placing styled 

Word and Excel tables. Tables can flow across multiple pages for easy editing 

and automatically include headers and footers. Extensive formatting options, 

including alternating fill and stroke controls, enable you to fine-tune the final 

design of your tables, and you can create table styles and cell styles to quickly 

and consistently format tables and cells.

In InDesign, tables are always 

anchored in a text frame. To cre-

ate a new table, select the Type tool, 

place the text cursor inside a frame 

or create a new text frame, and then 

choose Table > Insert Table. 
The Insert Table dialog box lets you 

specify the number of rows and col-

umns for your table. However, you 

can later make the table larger or 

smaller by placing the text cursor 

inside the table and using the options 

in the Table panel.
By default, the inserted table fills the 

width of the container text frame. If 

you make the frame smaller, the table 

remains visible outside the frame. 

Tables flow with surrounding text, 

just like anchored objects. Each cell 

in an InDesign table is similar to a 

text frame of its own, into which you 

can place text, graphics, and other 

tables. 
You can adjust each column width 

and row height in a table by dragging 

the dividers with the Type tool. 

InDesign provides a number of ways 

to turn text into tables and tables 

into text. For example, you can 

import tab-delimited text files from 

a spreadsheet or database, select the 

text with the Type tool, and choose 

Table > Convert Text To Table.

You can import a table from a 

Microsoft Word or Excel document 

like any other text file. Select Show 

Import Options as you import the 

data to fine-tune the imported data.
If you copy tabular data from Word 

or Excel, you can paste it into an 

InDesign table by placing the text 

cursor in the upper leftmost cell you 

want to populate, and then press-

ing Esc (to select the cell itself) and 

choosing Edit > Paste.

Because tables are anchored in 

text, InDesign lets you thread them 

across multiple text frames, making 

it easy to work with lengthy tabular 

information. You can set up running 

header and footer rows that appear 

at the top or bottom of the table on 

each page. To convert a normal row 

to a header row, select it with the 

28  Adobe InDesign CS5  |  Conversion Guide