294 Adjust table strokes in Table Settings

- [Instructor] Here is a super simple tip that every InDesign user who creates tables needs to know but very few do. Here's the problem that I'm trying to solve, I want to set the weight and color for all the strokes between the columns and rows as quickly as possible and preferably, I'd like to save them inside of a table style so that I could apply them quickly later, right? But, unfortunately, the way that InDesign works, it looks like you have to do this by creating cell styles and cell styles are great, don't get me wrong, but they're kind of annoying, especially when all you want to do is change all the strokes in your table.

So, I'm here to tell you that you can do this without cell styles just by changing the table settings itself. Okay, let me show you how. First, I need to place my text cursor inside the table, of course, so I'll simply double click inside of a cell to switch to the type tool. Now, I'm going to go up to the Table menu and I'll choose Table Options and then Table Setup. Now, inside the Table Options dialog box, you'll see the section called Table Border, but this only controls the strokes on the outside of the table, the four exterior sides of the table.

For example, I could make those disappear by changing the color to None. Now, this table won't have any strokes on the outside edges but what about the interior strokes? Well, up here at the top of the dialog box, you can see that there's a feature called Row Strokes but the only thing we see in here is a way to change the alternating pattern. For example, every other row, every second row, and so on. Same thing is true in the Column Strokes section. Every other column, every second column, and so on.

Now alternating patterns are cool but it doesn't seem that helpful if you want all of your strokes to be the same, right? Like, I want all of my strokes to be three points and green but this feature only lets me set every other column. Well, the solution is actually very simple, though, I have to admit that it took me a long time before I realized it. All you need to do is choose one of these alternating patterns. For example, every other column, and then set the first and second column to be exactly the same.

Like, here, I'll set the weight to three points and I'll make it green and then over here on the right side, I'll do exactly the same thing. Three points and green. Now that was just at column strokes. I could also change the row strokes as well, those are the horizontal lines. I'll come over here and choose every other row and then I'll make this three points and green and then once again, three points and green. Now remember, this does not change the strokes on the outside of the table, that's controlled over here inside Table Setup in the Table Border section.

So, great, I have changed all the strokes and columns inside the table and I'm going to go ahead and click OK and see how it looks. There we go. Green, three point strokes, throughout the entire thing. It's a little bit hard to see here because I can still see my frame edges, so I'm going to go up to the View menu and come down to Extras and I'll turn off frame edges by choosing Hide Frame Edges. There we go, that looks great. Of course, I'm going to want to apply this to a bunch of tables in my document, so I better turn this into a table style.

To do that, I'll open the Window menu, choose Styles, and then choose Table Styles. Let's create a new table style by going to the Table Styles panel menu and choose New Table Style. Now, all I need to do is give it a name. I'll call this my happy style. You can call it anything you want, of course, and now I'm going to click OK and apply that style to this table by simply clicking on it. Great, there we go, I have now applied this style to this table.

Now the next time I want to apply that style to a table like this one down here, let's go ahead and scroll this up, there we go, now, I simply click inside that table, come back over to the Table Styles panel, and click once on my new style and it applies all that format into the style. So, again, I set up all of those strokes with a table style and without using any cell styles. You don't have to use cell styles when making a table style and, in this case, it makes formatting the table even easier if you don't.