Best Practices for Creating Tables

[Mateomono]

Hi, 
I'm fairly new to creating book layouts. I need to create various tables and wanted to ask if there are any best practices and things to avoid. Thank you very much!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Rather than asking a broad, open-ended question about whole areas of InDesign and book design, you'd be best off with the various Adobe Help and tutorial pages. The formal presentation will give you a better grounding, and then you can ask more specific questions here to refine and extend your understanding.

Here's a good strarting point for ID itself: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/user-guide.html

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Mateomono

It depends on: 

- source - part of the WORD document, separately stored in Excel, exported from an online database, etc. 

- size - number of columns / rows, 

- quantity - few or 100s / 1000s,

- formatting - simple header, footer, body - or with complicated formatting based on the specific cells contents, etc. 

- if it's one time import or multiple updates, 

[Barb Binder]

Hi @Mateomono:

I work on a lot of tables and so I'm thinking about them all the time. Here are some ideas you may find useful.

Tables imported from Word tend to pull in overrides, so as first best practice, I always start by removing overrides. I select the entire table and then:

1. Alt/Opt click on [None] in Cell Styles,
2. Alt/Opt click on [Basic Table] in Table Styles,
3. Alt/Opt click on [None] in Character Styles, and
4. Alt/Opt click on [Basic Paragraph] in Paragraph Styles

From there, I focus on designing the first table in a book layout. This includes creating the paragraph styles to format the text, cell styles that nest the paragraph styles and control the ruling and shading, and finally a table style that nests the cells styles and anything left at the table level.

Tables slow me down when I'm working through a document, and I've learned the hard way that if I can slow myself down and thoughtfully design all of the styles to take advantage of InDesign's table features, I will save time in the long run. 

I also set up my workspace so that those four style panels are visible so that I can move easily between them as I work. 

I hope this gives you some things to think about, and come see us again if you get stuck along the way. 

~Barb