Importing tables into Adobe InDesign

Afternoon from Howabout Creative Solutions - the friendly (and creative) graphic design agency in Harrogate. We've had a good week here - it's been half term, so had my lovely daughter at home, which means work sometimes spills over into the evening after she has gone to bed, but projects continue to be delivered on time, on budget, and above the expectations of the clients. Which is nice!

Continuing my recent theme (okay I've only done 1 so far) of sharing graphic design tips 'n' tricks, I thought I'd briefly talk about importing and styling up tables in Adobe InDesign. I've encountered numerous occasions when I've been faced with working with huge Microsoft Excel tables, sometime running to several pages. At first glance, they look daunting to deal with, but it's really quite simple...

Choose the 'Place' option in InDesign and activate the 'Show Import Options' button. When you have located the table in question you will find it imports with the cells and data in place (although some elements may be flowing off the page boundary). Highlight an entire cell and then choose 'Edit: Select all' to highlight all the text. You can then apply your chosen font, size, colour etc. You can also grab the edge of cells and expand or reduce them to fit your page width, or rotate text within cells to run it vertically.

Next, and this is a useful tip, highlight the top row that contains the header for each column, right click and choose 'Convert to Header Rows'. If your table spans several pages, the details of this row will then appear at the top of every page.

Another useful trick is to put an alternating background pattern on the rows, to make them easier to follow from left to right, and to make the table more aesthetically pleasing. Highlight all the cells, right click again, go to 'Table Options: Alternating Fills: Alternating Pattern' and choose 'Every Other Row' and try a 20% tint of a colour for the first row, and a 30% for the next row. Just play around until you find a colour and tint that your are happy with.

In fact, highlighting all the cells, and right clicking gives you all sort of options - setting the colour and thickness of the cell strokes; distributing columns and rows evenly; adding and deleting rows and columns - the list goes on. It really does make styling tables up really easy, and crucially it means you don't have to manually input supplied data yourself, and run the very real risk of entering it incorrectly.

I hope you found this little exercise useful. I find it works well if done in conjunction with something loud and guitar driven on the stereo - Led Zeppelin or Jane's Addiction for instance - but that might just be me...

Have a great weekend.

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