Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Bible

Chapter 20. Working with Tables

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Importing tables created in Microsoft Word and Excel

• Creating and using InDesign tables

One common way to present data is in tabular format. Tables orient data into rows and columns. The intersection of each row and column is called a cell. Cells can hold text, images, or even another table. The format applied to a table is typically consistent across all the cells that make up the table.

Tables created in external applications such as Microsoft Word or Excel may be imported into CS applications such as InDesign, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. The Clipboard is often used to move tables between applications.

In addition to importing tables, InDesign supports tables and table styles for easy creation and duplication of tables. InDesign includes table features for adding rows and columns, merging cells and creating a table from tab-delimited text. Individual cells are formatted in a number of ways, including alignment, cell strokes and fills, and evenly distributed cells. In addition, you can create dynamic links between Excel spreadsheets and InDesign tables so that changes in a spreadsheet are dynamically updated in InDesign files.

Dreamweaver also can create tables based on HTML. Although most of the table-formatting options in Dreamweaver are the same as the options for tables in InDesign, there are some differences between the two.

In this chapter, we talk about tables as they relate to Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. For information ...