216 Adding continued headers to tables

- You probably already know that InDesign has a feature that lets you put headers at the top of each table even when the table spans across two or more columns or text frames or pages. But what if you want a slightly different header at the top of subsequent pages? For example, a regular heading on page one, and then a header that says "continued" on the other pages. Well, here's how to do it. First, in this document, I have two different frames on the same page. This could be multiple pages, but I'm doing it on the same page just because it's easier to see in this demo.

I'll select this first frame, and I'll zoom in to 200% by pressing CMD 2 or CTRL 2 on Windows, and then let's scroll down a little bit so we can see both of those frames. I'm going to thread these frames together by clicking on the out port of the first one and clicking on top of the second one. Now you can see that this table which was too big to fit in this first frame, spans or continues on to the second frame. The problem is I can't see the header down here, so I don't know what each of these columns means. I'd really like to duplicate that first header row, the purple one, down here.

Now, you may know that you can do that simply by switching to the type tool which I'll do by double clicking, that switches to the type tool automatically, then I'll select this row, which I can do by placing my cursor just outside to the left of the row and clicking. Now the row is selected. Now I'm going to go to the Table menu, choose Convert Rows and then I could choose To Header. Now, I could do that, but I want to point out that this header would be exactly the same at the top of every table, the top of every text frame in this thread.

In this case, I don't want that, right? I want the subsequent ones to say "Continued" in them. I want them to be a little bit different. So, I'm not going to choose this quite yet. Instead, here's the trick. I'm going to duplicate this row. To do that, I'm going to hover my cursor over the row. It's already selected, right? So, I hover over the row and you'll see the cursor changes into, well it looks like it has a little stack of bricks next to it. When I see that, it means that I can now move this whole row. I don't want to move it.

I want to duplicate it. So, I'm going to hold down the Option key on the Mac or the ALT key on Windows and now I'm going to drag it down a little bit. I just dragged down a tiny bit, and I can see this big, thick line up here. And when I see that, I can let go of the mouse button. Now, it's duplicated the entire row. I should point out that the Option or ALT drag trick only works in InDesign CC 2014 or later. If you're using an earlier version of InDesign, you can duplicate that first row by copying it, inserting a new empty row, selecting the new row, and then pasting.

Okay, now you can see we have two rows that look exactly the same. I'm going to edit this row on top. I'm going to click just before the text at the top of this cell, and I'm going to press the Return key and then the left arrow key, and I'll just type "Continued" up here. And that looks pretty good. Next, I need to change this first row into a real header row, and you can do that by selecting the entire row or just have your text cursor flashing inside any cell inside that row.

That's what I have right now. The text cursor is flashing in there, so I'm going to go to the table menu, choose Convert Rows and then choose To Header. So, that's great. It's a header row which means it'll show up not just in that first frame, but also in all subsequent frames like this one down here. But of course, in this case, I don't want it to be in that first frame. So, what do I do? So, here's the trick. I'm going to go to the Table menu, come down to Table Options and then inside the Table Options pop up menu, I'm going to choose Headers and Footers.

Inside the Headers and Footers tab of the Table Options dialogue box, I'm going to choose this check box: Skip First. That means, make this a header, but skip the first frame. And now you'll see when I click okay that we only have one header in the first page and a different one in the subsequent pages. Most InDesign users don't even know that that Skip First feature is inside the Table Options dialogue box. So, now you know not only that it's there, but why you'd want to use it.