A Script for Easier Table Formatting in InDesign

Applying a table style to an existing table in InDesign is often a lesson in futility. While cell styles seem to work as designed, table styles usually don’t. When you apply a table style to an existing table, the appearance of the table often doesn’t change as you’d expect. InDesign tries to preserve the existing formatting of the table as “overrides,” so most of the formatting defined in the incoming table style doesn’t get applied. Most users end up manually applying cell styles to the body, header, and footer rows to achieve the desired formatting. Keep in mind that table styles are intended to “cascade.” In other words, a table style can specify that one or more cell styles get automatically applied to the table body, header, footer, left column, and right column whenever you apply the table style to a table. Cell styles can specify that a paragraph style is applied every time the cell style is applied to a cell. To overcome the problems described above, I wrote a script. It allows you to apply a table style to an InDesign table, and all the table formatting defined in the table style—including cell styles and any paragraph styles defined in those cell styles—will be accurately applied to the table, clearing out all style overrides. So, you can format an entire table with a single click, all the way down to formatting the text within the table’s cells with paragraph styles, potentially saving a lot of confusion, frustration, and wasted time. You can download the Apply Table Style Clear Overrides script

at GilbertConsulting.com. The download package contains a Read Me with installation and usage instructions.