173 Editing table set up from the keyboard

- Here's a problem that an InDesign user emailed me, they just could not figure out. And I thought this would make a great video for our InDesign Secrets series here at Lynda.com. And that is working with tables and scaling existing tables, and modifying them from the keyboard and from the mouse, rather than having to reconstruct them from scratch to get what you want. Her situation was similar to what we're looking at here, she had an existing document that had just a little bit of space, let's say right here. If I go to Preview mode, you'll see the area that I want to put the table in, right there.

But the table was too big. Now, in this case it's just a simple little table, but in her case it was a big, complicated table with all sorts of merged cells and things, and she just could not figure out how to get it to fit the area without having to reconstruct it from scratch. Actually, it's pretty simple. First, you need to get the table into its own, stand-alone text frame. If it's in another part of the document as part of the story, select it all and copy it into its own text frame as I've done here. Tables always have to be inline with the text flow in a document, but if you need to manipulate the table separate from the text that's surrounding it, it's best to extract it into its own text frame.

Then the second thing that you wanna do, especially if you're going to scale the table, the easiest way is to kiss-fit the text frame to fit the table, and you can do that simply by double-clicking on the handle that you want to move. So I just double-clicked on the lower right-hand handle, and it snapped up to fit. So this is the big table, and we need it to fit in that little area, all you need to do is to scale the entire table, including its contents. So I'm going to snap it to the upper left-hand corner of where I want it to be, and then holding down the Shift and Command key on my Mac, or Shift and Control key on Windows, I drag the lower right-hand handle and scale it to fit.

So it is not only scaling the column width and row depth as much as it can, but it's also scaling the text to fit. So I wasn't able to get it exactly as small as I wanted, let's see if I can get it to fit upper and lower. So I could do that, and this is actually what she did, because she could not edit any of the rows, really. She made it to scale to fit top and bottom. Let's zoom in here with Command- or Control-plus a few times. So now that we have the height fitting, and the width is inside, then we just have to fill up this empty space.

And you would have to do that by dragging the column guides out to where you want. But look at what just happened, I dragged the furthermost right one out, and now when I drag the second one, then that one moves with it. So I'm gonna Undo. What you wanna do is, you wanna fill up the horizontal space by dragging the furthermost column guide, and then hold down the Shift key as you drag the other column guides. Holding down the Shift key restricts the resizing of the column widths to the column on either side of that column guide.

A little easier to see than to explain, and I'm dragging, let's hide the guides. And holding down the Shift, and drag, Shift, and drag, and so on. So you can just even it out that way, which was a lot faster than having to reconstruct the complicated table. Couple other things I wanna show you about tables is that if you hold down the Option key, or the Alt key, as you drag a guide, it will create additional rows and columns, but that only works if you're on the furthermost right or bottommost guide.

I need to switch to the Type Tool first, all editing of tables happens with the Type Tool. If I hold down the Option or Alt key, and start to drag, then I drag out an extra column. If I do the same thing down here, hold down the Option or Alt key and start to drag, then I drag an extra row. If you hold down the Option or Alt key and you get the little hand that means that you're going to move the page around, then you need to press down first on the guide and then hold down the Option key. One last trick I wanted to show you is that if you need to rearrange these rows, you don't need to cut and paste.

Let's say I wanna move Eggs and "Flour and cereal products" to right above Poultry, you can just drag and drop right above Poultry, and they'll jump there. So even if you don't have drag-and-drop editing enabled for your layout, it still works in tables, which I think is pretty cool. So, there you have it. Tables can be intimidating to some people at first, but if you just know those few simple tricks about scaling and resizing columns and rows, they become much easier to deal with.