Editor’s Note: this post was excerpted from Diane’s handout from CreativePro Week 2017. This year, Diane spoke about Engaging Interactive Documents and Publish Online. Sign up for a Virtual Pass so you don’t miss out!
One of most effective things you can do to improve the appearance of your tables is to change the pattern of row and column strokes. The default, 1-pt black stroke around all cells just screams “boring!”
The key to working with strokes is the stroke proxy in the Control panel. You click to select the strokes of the proxy that represent the table strokes you want to format, and click off the strokes you don’t want to format.
The proxy will change its appearance, too, depending on how many cells you have selected. If you select just one cell, there are only four strokes on the proxy, each stroke in the proxy representing each stroke on the four sides of the cell.
But when you have several cells selected, or an entire table, the proxy has six strokes, four on the outside and two on the inside. Each outside stroke on the proxy, again, represents the individual outside strokes of the cells selected (or the border, if the whole table is selected).
But the inside horizontal and vertical strokes of the proxy each represent all the inside horizontal or vertical strokes in the cells you’ve selected. One of these proxy strokes can represent many strokes in your table.
Stroke proxy selection shortcuts
It’s good to mix up stroke patterns in your table. But turning on and off parts of the stroke proxy can be tedious. Use these clicking shortcuts instead of clicking one-by-one.
A. Click once at the intersection of the inside strokes to turn the inside strokes on/off.
B. Click once on any corner point to turn the two adjoining strokes on/off.
C. Click twice on any outside stroke to turn off/on all outside strokes.
Triple-click on any stroke or point to turn all strokes on/off.
To avoid confusion, when you’re going to change the overall stroke pattern of your table, try this: start by turning all the strokes off, then build the pattern. To turn off any stroke, select it in the proxy and set the color to [None]. This also sets the weight of the stroke to 0 (zero). By starting with no strokes, it’s easy to figure out which strokes you want to format.
In fact, turning off all the strokes on a table gives you the flexibility to use tables in all kinds of new ways. It’s the first step to freeing your tables from that spreadsheet look, allowing you to use the underlying grid of a table to work for you in other types of layouts that don’t even look like tables at all.
Set strokes for an entire table
You can use alternating row and column strokes to set stroke patterns for your entire table. In the Alternating Row/Column Strokes tabs of the Table Options dialog box, set the Alternating Pattern to Every Other Row/Column. Set the weight, stroke, and color of the First stroke to be the same as the Next stroke.
This technique allows you to create stroke patterns that don’t require cell formatting or cell styles.
To create a table that by default has no strokes, set Row and Column strokes Color to [None], and set the Border stroke color to [None].
You can easily capture these settings in a Table Style and use it throughout your document. Or make it the default style by clicking on the style name when no table is selected.
This article was last modified on June 25, 2020
This article was first published on June 20, 2019
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