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Annual Report tips

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    • #53795
      Uncle Phil
      Member

      I have a question for anybody who's willing to answer. When creating an annual report, what is the best way to format the financials? We usually receive them in the form of excel spreadsheets and I figure the best way is to import them directly as a spreadsheet, whereas my coworker (who, in fairness, is not as adept with indesign as I am) tends to copy and past and use tabs. It seems to work for her but it seems very tedious as well. Are there more efficient ways to do this? Styles, XML (which I'm not too familiar with but I understand is very useful)…any assistance would be appreciated!

      (this is my first post!)

    • #53797
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Usually I use tables, as you colour these quite easily, set up styles etc. Very flexible, easy to do the double underline for sums (using paragraph rules, underline options, cell strokes and other ways, whichever you prefer).

      Tabbed text would work fine too, but what about when an account goes over two pages, you'd want the header information to follow, the only way I can think to do that would be to manually insert another row of text on the following page, that information changes and you have to remember to move that line of text again.

      Also tabbed text can have background colour using Paragraph Rule Above and below, but this is limited in the fact that you have to adjust the stroke weight for each additional line of text, as well as for different sections of the table you're trying to use.

      Going outside of this, the other way would be to put object frames behind the text to shade the tables, and this is troublesome as it won't move unless it's anchored, which is a problem for tables that split over two pages or that have to change as new information is inserted.

      Tables are the way to go, I think, much easier to manipulate and stylise.

    • #53809

      I am now doing annual reports, as well. Someone else in the shop used to do them and it was done in Quark–and it would take him week.

      I switched it over to InDesign CS4 this year, and cut the time in half by using ID’s table feature. I’m sure I can shave off more time when I tweak it more next year.

    • #53823
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Quark has tables too – but I don't know why Quark users don't use them? I receive some files in Quark and it boggles me why they haven't used tables. Old dog, new tricks, perhaps? In fact, I think some of the features of the Quark table are great, like the link order, and picture cells, and things like that. The ability to link to an external file via the dialog box.

    • #53845

      Hank–for the guy who was doing it, it was a thing of old dog, new tricks. I could have done it either way, though I must confess I totally prefer ID over Quark. And a lot of our clients want things moved over to InDesign. They're converting when they can and all new jobs are ID.

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