InReview: Table Tools for InDesign

InDesign’s table creation and editing features first appeared 21 years ago in InDesign 2.0. While their scope, precision, and typographic control were groundbreaking at the time, Adobe hasn’t made significant improvements to InDesign’s table features in many years. That’s a shame. The resulting tables are often large, detailed, and complex. But, wait—don’t we present information in table form because that information is complex in the first place? As designers, we find ourselves trying to fit lots of columns of information into a finite space, and tables turn into a production challenge as we work with them as quickly and efficiently as possible. We long for a better table experience. This is where Table Tools can help. Table Tools is composed of three scripts, not plug-ins, so no installer is provided; you’ll need a very basic knowledge of how to install a script and run it from the InDesign Scripts panel. This is something anyone can learn to do, and this knowledge will pay off in spades as you find other scripts to make your life easier. One good set of script installation instructions can be found here.

Autofit Columns

Autofit Columns automates the process of determining the narrowest possible width of a table column that will accommodate all the data in the column without the data becoming overset or wrapping to multiple lines.  Basic operation is very simple and understandable. Just select one or more columns (or one or more cells within the columns) and run the script by double-clicking it in the Scripts panel. The dialog box (Figure 1) that opens contains a couple of options. In normal use, you’ll just click the Autofit button and be done with it. When you do, the script narrows or widens the width of each selected column

to accommodate the longest text in any cell in the column.

Due to the complexity of tables, the script must take lots of things into consideration. For example, as the script calculates the column width, it analyzes left and right paragraph indents, as well as left and right cell indents. What should happen if you have a long column head that spans multiple narrower columns (Figure 2)? Autofit Columns handles this just as you’d expect, making the narrower columns wide enough to accommodate the spanning head.  Normally, the script sets the text in the selected columns so that all the text fits on a single line per cell (unless the text contains line breaks or paragraph returns). But what if you have column heads that already wrap the way you like and you want to preserve this wrap while optimizing the width of the column (Figure 3)? Selecting the Preserve Existing Line Breaks option handles this situation nicely. The Autofit Columns dialog box is non-modal; meaning, it can remain open and active while you perform other tasks in InDesign. You can run the script and leave it open, like a panel, while you continue to work on your document. That way, you can click the Autofit button whenever you need to. If you prefer to run the script from a menu instead of using the Scripts panel, you can choose to add a menu group called Id-Extras to your InDesign menus. From there, you can select the AutoFit Columns script or other scripts from the developer. The Autofit Columns script does one other useful thing: The Table Width Adjustments feature will make a secondary adjustment to the table after the selected column(s) have been adjusted to the minimum width. It will widen (or narrow) each column proportionally to make the table fit the current table width, the table’s frame, a portion of the frame, or a specific number of text columns (Figure 4). This feature can save you a ton of adjustment work. I’ve run into only a couple of situations where Autofit Columns didn’t provide optimal results. First, the Preserve Existing Line Breaks option doesn’t preserve breaks in rotated column heads, and these rotated heads sometimes confuse the script. Second, if you’ve included a tab character in a cell, perhaps to align numerals with decimal points, the script doesn’t take tab stops into account when calculating the minimum column width.

Center Columns in Table

Don’t let the simple name of this script fool you. Sure, it centers the contents of all the selected cells in a table. But, more importantly, it will center a long column of data while right aligning or decimal aligning the data with each other. You can see a before-and-after example in Figure 5.

The script does its magic by adjusting the right indent of the text in each selected cell. Like Autofit Columns, Center Columns also operates in a non-modal dialog box, so you can leave it open on your screen for easy access.

Delete All Empty Columns and Rows 

This script, as the name states, deletes any empty rows or columns from any selected tables, or from all tables in the document. An “empty” row can optionally contain white space characters such as word spaces, fixed (em, en, thin, figure) spaces, or tabs. The script also performs three other very useful tasks. The Unmerge All Cells option unmerges all the table cells that have been merged, either vertically or horizontally. Again, you can apply it to either selected tables or all the tables in the document (Figure 6).

Set All Cells to Auto-Grow changes the height of all the rows in the selected tables, or all tables in the document, from Exactly to At Least so that they automatically grow in height to accommodate their contents (Figure 7). This is often the preferred setting for many people, so it’s convenient to have a way to specify this setting en masse.  The Set Width of All Tables option allows you to specify a width, in the measurement system of your choosing, for the selected tables or all the tables in the document. I tested the Delete Empty Rows and Columns script on a 194-page document containing 11 tables, and it processed all the tables in the document nearly instantaneously. I don’t expect processing speed to be an issue in even longer documents with more complex tables.

TableTV

The developer of Table Tools has published a video where he demonstrates the Center Columns in Table script, including what the Create Right-Side Outdent feature does. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to explain, but easy to understand when you can see a demonstration!

Tables Enabled

The scripts included in Table Tools don’t address all the shortcomings of InDesign’s tables feature set, but they certainly remove a lot of the repetitive, painstaking production work that would otherwise be necessary to create attractive, easy-to-read tables.

• Collection includes Autofit Columns, Center Table Columns, and Delete Empty Rows and Columns scripts
• Bookraft LLC (dba Id-Extras.com)
• Annual subscription, $59/year (perpetual licenses: $99 for Autofit Columns and $49 for Center Table Columns)
• InDesign CS5 or later, macOS or Windows
• Rating: 4.5 Stars