Adobe InDesign, 2nd Edition

Table & Cell Styles

To give visual structure to text, we can use tab characters and tab stops, as discussed in “Tabs” (page 206). But for longer runs of structured text, especially if the source is Microsoft Excel, tables are more suitable.

InDesign’s default table style is not attractive: Each cell has a black stroke. To apply more attractive formatting easily and consistently requires making a custom table style and its attendant cell styles. Cell styles can apply paragraph styles to their content automatically, too.

Creating all those styles can take time. If the source of the table is a spreadsheet built and thoroughly formatted in its source application, it may be counterproductive to recreate that formatting in InDesign. In that other ...