Sorry to be curt, but why are tables so terrible? How is it that the market leading software package in layout design has such awful table functionality? It's so haphazardly put together - you have to click very carefully to navigate around the table, depending on whether you wanted to type in a cell or just select it, the tools for adjusting the appearance of cells, columns etc. are so difficult and unintuitive to use, and the greatest insult is that if you happen to be inside the table window, but not in a cell, and you type a letter (like, I don't know, if you were planning on using the keyboard shortcut to select another tool), you actually type a letter into a line above the table, shifting it down a bit. Who on earth thought this was acceptable? Are tables just elaborate text boxes? Is that how this happened? Why is it not possible to simply click one or two buttons to make all your rows or columns have a uniform width/height? Why, when I adjust the width of a column, is there not an option for this to affect multiple columns? Why is it that the total width/height of a table cannot be constrained to the size of the bounding box it's in? Why, when the table exceeds these limits, does a column or row just disappear? Why am I left just eyeballing it to make sure my table is neat and evenly spaced out? Why isn't there an option to disallow columns/rows to disappear when they exceed the limits - instead of just adjusting their own width/height to allow room? It's 2019. Tables have been like this for years. Adobe is a huge corporation with millions in revenue - why can't they just assign someone to write a new table system? Suggested fix: Better, more intuitive table panel. Yes, we have the context sensitive tools on the top panel, but let's be honest, they're fiddly, and yes, we already have a tables panel, but that's also far too ineffective. We need tools that you can actually use to make changes to the table using your cursor, rather than having to eyeball it or the in numbers. We also need a full colour picker for the cell styles (we need a PROPER RGB/CMYK/HSB colour picker for InDesign in general anyway, but lets pick our battles here, and save that for another thread). Because at the moment we can only select colours from the swatches panel to go into a cell style. It's frankly a farce that Adobe has been taking this much money off of us for so long, without actually making much of an effort to improve their software. Yes, other things have improved and a lot of stuff is happening with After Effects and other, new software packages, but do not forget about InDesign, please. You might be the biggest software package on the market, but if you get complacent, you won't be for long.
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