My tables are completely missing

[Dynamic Office]

I'm getting really tired of continuously having to do extra work because of Indesign deciding to glitch out.

My Tables on some 20+ pages of a 200-page catalogue have vanished and been replaced by object boxes.

Here's a page as intended;

and here is a page with the glitch tables;

I've tried Cutting and pasting back in, pasting onto a new document and still it just sits as if it's an object box.

I'm on a very tight deadline of 1 week to complete this and I could just about see the light at the end of the tunnel and now I'm potentially going to have to push back my ETA because of this ridiculous software.

Windows 10

Indesign CC (13.1.0.76)

[Dynamic Office]

luckily, I've learnt my lesson as i've been stung by this program in the past. I have been saving daily intervals so will just copy and paste from a previous version

However, that doesn't make it right - I'd like to know what has caused this issue and how it can be prevented in the future? 

[Eric Dumas]

Can you confirm that all the tables/text/images is prepared in MS Word or are you using a Data Merge approach?

[Dynamic Office]

These are custom made and manually filled in within indesign, no external software or Datamerge has been used.

I had someone reviewing the catalogue yesterday - When I had opened that file the glitch was still present. Interestingly though, the tables appear when I export it as a PDF...

[Eric Dumas]

Do you have access to a computer with a more powerful video card?

On a Mac, there are ways to purge video ram which helped me in the past Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac - Apple Support

[Dynamic Office]

My video card is a GTX 1050ti, more than capable of handling Indesign, my processor is an i7 4770k

I don't even have graphics card acceleration turned on

[Barb Binder]

Yikes. I'm glad you have devised a way to get around it and get the job out but you will want to report this on the InDesign Feedback page so that the Adobe InDesign team sees it. You can just reference this thread since you were able to explain the problem so clearly.

Adobe InDesign Feedback

~Barb

[dave_c_courtemanche]

A few questions:

Are the text boxes containing the tables threaded?

Are you using a Header Row?

Have you exporter doc to .idml and reopened?

Is this one 200 pg doc, or are you breaking it up & using the book function?

I had some oddness with header rows and a table stretched over multiple pages - sections of the table kept disappearing. Not quite the same as your issue, but frustrating. Curious as to if it's related to table disfunction or a corrupt doc.

[Laubender]

Hi Dave,

FWIW: the problem with missing header and footer rows was a now fixed bug with an older version of InDesign CC 2017.1.

There even was a hotfix installer for this:

Troubleshoot issues after updating to InDesign CC 2017.1

Re: Table header rows disapear when copy-pasting

Regards,
Uwe

[Dynamic Office]

Hi Dave,

Not sure what you mean by threaded, could you elaborate?

Yes, I am using Header rows,

I have not tried this but will give it a go.

It's one document - Would you advise breaking it up as it's so large?

[dave_c_courtemanche]

Threaded as in one text box is connected to another text box. Menu/View/Extras/Show Text Threads. According to Uwe, that table bug has been addressed, so shouldn't be the issue.

Have you exported to .idml to try & remove corruption?

I prefer to break up large books, as it really can start to drag on my performance. My product catalog is 128 pgs, with 500 MB hero shots on pages, multiple product images of 50 MB each on pages, etc. I've broken it into 7 chapters, managed in a book document. I've found it much more manageable. I sync all my master pages & styles through the book, so it works well.

[Laubender]

Hi Charles,

this is a really weird situation.

To test if the frames are really empty you can do two things:

1. Select a frame and change its dimensions, make it larger.

Maybe that would fix a redraw error.

2. Select a frame and do keyboard commands Ctrl + y ( Windows ) or Cmd +y ( Mac OS X ) to open the Story Window for the frame. If something's still hiding in the story you'd see it from there.

If you still cannot see anything of your tables they are really gone.

And I guess, you will not be able to restore them even by exporting to IDML and open the IDML as new document.

Leaves the question: How can this issue be prevented?

Since we have no answer to how this all happened, I also have no answer for that.

Sorry.

Regards,
Uwe