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• • August 31, 2013 at 3:34 am #65127
    Richard Harris

    Member

    Hi,

    I’m new here and asked this question on the Adobe forums but didn’t get much in the way of a definitive answer. Would anyone on here be able to provide any input about working with multi-page tables in InDesign, which appear to be very unstable as I’ve just got another table-heavy document project (2000 pages in total) coming up.

    Over the past year or so, my team and I have worked with InDesign 5 and 5.5 on both Mac (10.6) and Windows (XP and 7) machines. In that time we have found if there’s one thing that will cause InDesign to crash it’s a table that runs over several pages and particularly (though not exclusively) if it’s got merged cells. Add that extra row, merge that extra cell, even just insert your text cursor as you prepare to change some text and InDesign seems to reach a point where the “straw breaks the donkey’s back” and it falls over. At least it usually has the courtesy to reopen at exactly the point where the crash occurs with all the other changes that have been made still in place, whether they have been manually saved or not.

    We use standard fonts, no special plug-ins or scripts but the text and tables in our two-column frames does span both columns fairly frequently which apparaently can be a bit dodgey sometimes.

    The really weird thing is that sometimes the same file will crash on all the machines at the same point (as you would expect) but sometimes the files which crash on Windows machines will work fine on Macs and the files which crash on Macs will work fine on Windows machines. There doesn’t appear to be much of a consistent pattern to what’s going on.

    However, the solutions are always the same. First, unmerge any merged cells and adjust the border/fill commands to hide the fact they are now unmerged and then, if that doesn’t work, split the table up into separate chunks and put them into a separate text box on each page – that always seems to fix the problem, although the benefits of linked text boxes are now lost.

    I’ve had a scoot round the web and on these forums and whilst I can find quite a lot of material on this topic, there doesn’t appear to be anything that relates to our issue directly. I realise that I haven’t given specific information on what happens to us because it’s just something that happens every so often and we’re usually working so fast that there’s no time to carry out a detailed analysis of what’s going on, we just fix it and carry on. I’d be grateful if anyone could offer a general overview of what’s happening and maybe suggest some preventative measures we could take to reduce/eliminate the chances of this happening in the future.

    Upgrading our software is not an option due to company software and funding constraints.

    I hate to ask this but is Microsoft Word the better tool to use with long tables?

    Thanks in advance for any and all advice offered.

  • September 2, 2013 at 12:16 am #65133
    Gert Verrept

    Member

    I had the same problem with tables, the longer they become, the more “unstable” they are. Our problem came from the fact that lots of cells had text which had a style with ‘no hyphenation’ (several languages together, so difficult to set a dict). Merged cells from excel give problems too, they get unmerged when placed. Hidden cells, same problem, the appear in CC.
    I don’t think Word is the solution, but Excel does a wonderful job. It takes time, but I must admit that it’s better than CC for tables.
    Don’t forget that CC isn’t a “tables” program, it does a lot, but not all. It’s sometimes better to use a specific program to create something, make a pdf and import this file into Indesign. Changes are made in the original program, update the pdf and update the Indesign file.
    Do you start the tables from scratch? Import from another application? No style or char style problems?

  • September 2, 2013 at 7:38 am #65134
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    I’ve regularly dealt with tables of up to and over the 10,000-row limit, with a single table running to over 100 pages in InDesign, with only very rare crashes (and those not obviously related to the table structure). Predominantly CS3 and CS4 though (yes, another client who sticks with what works rather than upgrade pointlessly).
    The content arrives as tagged text (para styles already set), and is converted to a table in InDesign, with table and cell styles then applied afterwards. Also many cells are manually merged afterwards. If there are more than 10,000 rows in the imported text, it still makes a table successfully, but you can’t then add (insert) any more rows.
    Applying a style or a cell attribute to a whole column of a very large table can take many minutes, but it does it reliably.
    The only difference I can see from the case above is that these are all in single-column frames.
    As for Word and large documents/tables, I’ve had way more crashing problems there.
    Chris.

  • September 5, 2013 at 1:10 pm #65183
    Richard Harris

    Member

    Many thanks for the responses. Apologies for my delay in replying – I’m currently posting a LOT of hours at work!

    Interesting ideas from both of you – particularly creating a PDF from the Word file and importing that.

    I used to import the word document using cmd+D so the basic table structure from Word would stay intact and then restyle it using style sheets in InDesign. Over the past few days I’ve exported the Word file to plain text, imported that and then applied my style sheets. This takes longer to build the table but it does seem more stable, plus I avoild switching from two columns to one column in the same text box – and I’ve yet to format a continuous three-page table, so that may have something to do with it.

  • January 8, 2014 at 3:26 am #66589
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    For me(using CS6 on w7), switching from 2 columns to single column did the trick. ctrl+B, 1, edit the table (inputing data), ctrl+B, 2. done!

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