Would anyone ever make a Table like THIS?

[Piholio]

I just finished taking a college class on InDesign.

In addition to teaching, the professor also uses InDesign in a graphic designing job outside of school. So I figure the guy must know his stuff, right?

One of the things he taught us was: when we need to put a table into a document, there are two ways to do it:

1) In a text box, click Insert Table (from the Table menu) and specify the rows/columns, styles, etc.

or

2) Draw a horizontal line, select it, do Step-and-Repeat (from the Edit menu) to create the rows, then draw a vertical line and do Step-and-Repeat to create the columns, then put a text box on top of this, adjust your leading and set your tabs, and voila! You have a table.

Now here's the weird part: he actually said that method #2 was the better way to do it because it offered more flexibility.

I was like, wtf?

Is this really an acceptable alternative to making a table? Would any serious designer ever do this? This was a professor at a very well-respected university.

 

[eugenetyson]

Actually, option number 2 is old school baby. That's the way us mere mortals had to deal with tables in Quark, and even in CS I think?

Option number 2 is a lot more clunky.

The table option was added because people were sick of having to draw rules for tables and then line them all up exactly. Especially if you were dealing with a lot of tables. It could take about an hour to 5 tables on a page. And if you had 30 pages that's 150hours right there just for setting up tables, god forbid someone would make a change.

I think your professor has the right idea. It's nice to see how things were done back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but nobody wants to get a dinosaur to work with.

Tables were put in for a reason, because people demanded them. I have to admit that when I moved to CS2 I used to create tables the exact same way I did in quark. Until I realised that I can create tables right in indesign.

I recently opened up a document, one of my first InD CS2 docs, and I was like, oh my, what was I thinking. And I'm sure next year I'll open up some old file and go, oh my, what was I thinking. Because it's human nature to improve your workology.

 

[jimoblak]

Option 2 is not even old school. It is just dumb. Instead of step/repeating lines, one would ideally use a paragraph rule for horizontal lines. This is clearly reckless/uninformed instruction and you might discuss it with the teacher and maybe even report the matter to the department head.

ID tables were available in version 2 (pre CS) 5 years ago. QuarkXPress 5 introduced them at the same time. There is little excuse for any instructor to suggest manually making tables unless processing speed and file size is critical. Table structure info uses more data than a single text frame with tab stops. This is really only a concern if you are creating something like a 200 page book with a table filling every page - - and you are stuck on a 4+ year old computer. Things might crawl.

You might challenge your instructor to a race to compare which method offered more flexibility. ...or at least ask them for clarification. You are right to doubt their statement.

 

[eugenetyson]

Well jimoblak, I used to create tables using drawn lines and with paragraph rules. I agree, that method should not even be discussed. There's a lot to learn about tables and should really just have stuck with them and showed how cool they are. There's loads of things, like cell styles, table styles, moving rows/columns, inserting and deleting, creating shortcut keys specific to tables, merging cells, creating flow charts with tables etc. there's tonnes to learn tables alone.

 

[eugenetyson]

Oh yes, and, I left Quark at Quark 4 stage and went into InDesign CS2. I hadn't seen any InDesign before, nor had I heard of it.

 

[jimoblak]

There is no crime in using drawn lines to aid in 'old school' table creation. The crime is in neglecting paragraph rules entirely and instead using step-repeat to position horizontal lines and then wrestle with leading. That's as much of a high crime as using multiple spaces instead of tabs.

Daring doers can even make vertical paragraph rules.

http://typophile.com/node/29199

 

[eugenetyson]

Even so, that is very interesting about the vertical paragraph rules. It's a cunning plan if you needed it. But it's awkward enough to setup!