Sorting tables in Indesign? 3

[Tanya27]

I asked this question in an Advanced InDesign CS course and was told that "tables are icky" and could not under any circumstances be manipulated. Any opinions to the contrary out there?

 

[jmgalvin]

You'd have to be more specific about what "sorting tables" means.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[Tanya27]

By sorting tables I mean sorting the information contained in tables either by rows or columns. As in Excel, Framemaker etc.

 

[jmgalvin]

I'm on CS and that's not good in that version. However in Preferences/Text you can choose to "Create Links when placing spreadsheets and text".

The Excel doc then shows on the links pallette and you can choose Edit original from the flyout menu. After editing just update the link.

Unless you're actually creating tables, as opposed to getting Excel docs from others, this might be a little easier as it's quite easy to make changes to the Indesign doc when they send you a changed Excel doc. If you're creating tables from scratch and populating them with your own data, I'm guessing that you'll be unhappy with ID - unless CS2 has more funcionality. I don't know of any plugins or scripts availabe on Adobe Exchange that would handle this, but you could take a look.

If you're bringing stuff in from a data source, you might want to read up on Data Merge in Help. I don't need that so I can't help.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[Eggles]

Tanya

If you are referring to sorting columns alpahabetically or otherwise, ID CS2 is no better. If I need to do this, I will convert the table to text, export it out, do my sorting in Word (or Excel) and reimport the data. I find even handling cell borders a little tricky (the logic always seems the reverse to me), but one thing you do have in ID is the ability to resize all rwos/columns by width/height and inset the data by specific amounts - easier than in Word I think.

 

[Ekwoman]

As Eggles stated...it's not there in CS2. If you want great control over the way the tables look, InDesign is great. However, it assumes you have the data sorted as you need already are are merely manipulating the style.

If you do as jmgalvin said and keep the Excel file linked, when you re-import the data, you'll lose your formatting (if you've done any) to the table. A plug-in such as Smart Styles from Woodwing Software allows you to re-import, then drag a style on top of the table to re-style..pretty slick.

I use tables for all sorts of things and I love them. If it's tabular data, the data has usually been given to me and it sorted already...or I make sure it's all sorted before importing it.