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• • July 21, 2015 at 1:11 pm #76748
    Nicole Muller

    Member

    Is it considered a best practice to use tabs or tables to achieve the effect below? Why?

    View post on imgur.com

  • July 21, 2015 at 1:15 pm #76749
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    In general, I like to say “if it looks like a table, it probably should be a table.”
    However, I know that many people make these kinds of tables as paragraphs (rows) and tabs (columns). For simple layouts, that’s easy enough.

    But tables offer a number of features that are a pain with “tabular text, including alternating tints, graphic cells (in CC 2015), easy reordering of columns, and so on.

  • July 21, 2015 at 2:23 pm #76750
    Frances Simons

    Member

    Tables. Easy predictable copying too. I love tables in InDesign.

  • July 21, 2015 at 2:31 pm #76751
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Ninety percent of the time I’d make them tables. But there are times when if it’s small and I’m rushed for time, I’ll use tabs.

    There have been instances where I was doing the rough pages of a job, and the designer (who resided/worked in another state) didn’t know how to do tables in InDesign, so I had to do them all in tabs. This was the same designer who freaked out when I used anchored boxes in a recipe book for the ingredients. There was one other designer who freaked out when I used the table feature for recipe ingredients as well.

  • July 22, 2015 at 1:18 am #76753
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Ditto a vote for tables generally. Other advantages: easier to resize/adjust later, more formatting options (dividing lines that stay with the text if you change it, shaded columns instead of floating blocks of colour – again think about later adjustments), and you can wrap text within a cell without manual intervention.

    Chris.

  • July 22, 2015 at 12:18 pm #76791
    Nicole Muller

    Member

    Thanks for all the input!

    The thing that concerns me is mixed alignments. My sample has some text that I need to be centered and another that needs to be left justified. It seems like a lot of work to make some columns left justified and others centered. With tabs I can effect everything in 1 column at once. I’m pretty new to tables- is this something easily achieved using them?

  • July 23, 2015 at 1:09 am #76803
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Yes, easily achieved – just select the column (click at top edge of column or use the menu Table-Select-Column) and apply left/centre/right justification or all sorts of other text attributes.

    Chris

  • July 24, 2015 at 4:48 am #76853
    Michael Monos

    Member

    And remember that tables, while helpful in certain situations, also includes the limitation that you cannot use footnotes in them. Perhaps not a concern, but if even a remote possibility, I would use tabs.

  • July 25, 2015 at 9:26 am #76880
    Nicole Muller

    Member

    Thanks magnavra! I have a lot of these things (tabbed groups of text) and some of them definitely have footnotes. I’ve learned a lot about tables but for this application, tabs it seems, are the best way to go.

    Thank you all.

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