Table Columns not Aligning

[ken_7703]

This is the 2nd page of a table with 1 header row. On the first page the columns align, but not here and not elsewhere in the table.

Is there a way to adjust column widths of only some rows?

Thanks

[ken_7703]

Forgot to include the image. 😛

 

[Jeffrey_Smith]

Did you create the table from scratch within Indesign? This appears like some of the odd table structure you can get when placing from Word.

[ken_7703]

The file contains the specs of a series design we've been doing for MANY years and I couldn't even guess how it originated, honestly.

If there's not something I'm missing that allows one to adjust only some rows in a column, then you might be right, something wonky on import. I looked back after posting and found it's been like that since we ported the design from Ventura Publisher :o) to InDesign. Further on in the table columns changed size. The width of one cell was different from the cell immediately below it.

I'll just try recreating it. Hopefully simply copying and pasting rows into a new table will work.

Thanks for posting

[davecourtemanche]

You could try starting over by converting table to text and then text back to table. Will give you a clean start and possibly show what is going on in the table. If it has been split and merged many times, things can get sideways.

[Joel Cherney]

The other way to handle this, which I do not recommend, is to use the menu command Table - Unmerge Cells. If you were to Unmerge the Elements and Word Style cells, you could see how they were made by splitting and joining cells. Then you could do it for the whole table, and thereafter re-merge the cells without the extra-wide Elements header cell.

I@davecourtemanche 's solution is going to be faster for the vast majority of messed-up tables.  If suggest that you convert the damaged table to text and rebuild it, instead of trying to fix it by slowly dismantling it to find where it went wrong. 

[ken_7703 · Accepted solution]

Well, that's more than a little embarrassing. Table Setup menu shows 20 columns instead of just 6! XD Should have thought to check that. Cells are also merged in different ways row to row, very messy, which I could see using the Table > Unmerge cells suggested above.

Given that there was very little formatting in the actual table, I copied and pasted the entire thing into Excel. Happily, either Indesign didn't copy or Excel didn't paste the merged cells (I suspected the later) and there was very little fiddling I had to do get things back to good after pasting things back to newly created table. I think this saved some time over trying discern the tabs that would have resulted from converting to text.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions!

All the best,

Ken

[Willi Adelberger]

Click on top, so you see the arrow down. Click to select the whole column and change the width with nummeric input. Later you can adjust to final width. 

[Joel Cherney]

Given that there was very little formatting in the actual table, I copied and pasted the entire thing into Excel. Happily, either Indesign didn't copy or Excel didn't paste the merged cells (I suspected the later) and there was very little fiddling I had to do get things back to good after pasting things back to newly created table. I think this saved some time over trying discern the tabs that would have resulted from converting to text.

It absolutely does that! It also reveals where the issue was introduced. I'm not trying to trash-talk your workflow, here, but every time you use a shortcut like this, you are opening yourself to potential table trouble further down the line. 

Whenever you copy and paste a table from one table-supporting app (like MS Word) into another table-supporting app (like InDesign, or Excel, or You Name It) then there is likely going to be some kind of table-format conversion going on under the hood, where you can't see it. As @Jeffrey_Smith pointed out upthread, your screenshot shows exactly what it looks like when someone:

1. makes a table in Word
2. adjusts the width of a single cell manually with the mouse (which you can't do in InDesign)
3. then copies and pastes that table into InDesign, where the clipboard conversion tries to match the Word layout by splitting and merging InDesign table cells to come up with a table that more or less looks like the table did in Word, even though it has a completely different table-handling engine

By roundtripping through Excel via the clipboard, you are certainly minimizing the number of clicks needed to resolve this table's funky layout, today. I sincerely hope that you have not, at the same time, introduced Excel-clipboard-table-conversion weirdness that will be incompatible with some feature or bugfix that will be introduced in the 2029 release of InDesign, or something along those lines. It's not a bad bet, on your part - my unfortunately vast experience of Excel clipboard data going into and out of InDesign inclines me to believe that it's a much safer bet than roundtripping through Word, in your case. 

(It's still a wager, though.)