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Tip: One-Celled Tables
Have you ever wanted to draw a text box with different line thicknesses on each side? Or a box that only has a border on three sides? Try this trick, suggested by Quark’s Darin Overstreet: Make a table with only one column and one row, and then select each side individually (Shift-click on it) and change its color, style, or width (see figure 1). To make a box with a border on only three sides, select the fourth side and change its color to match the background. (Because you can’t set table gridlines to a color of None, this trick won’t work if you need to put the table over a picture or a multi-colored background.)
Figure 1: One-celled tables
Tip: Switching Rows and Columns
You’ve spent two hours setting up a table, and suddenly your art director says, “make all the rows into columns and vice versa.” Before you throw something at him, try this trick. Select the table and choose Convert Table to Text from the Table submenu (under the Item menu). In the Convert Table to Text dialog box, turn off the Delete Table checkbox (you may need the original later), and set the Text Extraction Order to Left to Right, Top Down (the one with the “Z” icon). Click OK, select all the text in the resulting text box (Command-A), and then choose Convert Text to Table from the Item menu. This time, change the Cell Fill Order to Top Down, Left to Right (the icon looks like a backward “N”). Your new table should have the same content as the first, but with the rows and columns switched. Unfortunately, XPress has no way to copy the gridline and cell background color formatting from one table to another, so you’ll have to do that manually.
Read more Real World Tips for QuarkXPress 5 here.
Peachpit Press is offering this book at a discount to creativepro.com readers. Follow this link.
This article was last modified on February 22, 2022
This article was first published on July 10, 2002
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