Table making in InDesign vs. FrameMaker

[aschmidt]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

does InDesign have a table designer like FrameMaker? i'm trying to turn some messy MSWord tables into pleasant ones in InDesign, and after reading entire 11 pages devoted to tables in the manual i'm thinking, not... but it's friday afternoon so i could just be experiencing feigned incompetence syndrome : )

[Miss Tiffany]

Yes, it does. It is pretty slick too. Well, in my opinion anyway.

[anonymous]

talking about inDesign: is there a way to scale the text proportionally by draging the textframe with control/alt/shift, the way it works with quark ? (and illustrator, in fact!)
I don

[hdschellnack]

InDesign has a scaling tool for test. It's that thing that looks like a picture frame (with the usual computer-object-handles) and a white cursor. If you give that thing a keyboard shortcut, you're quicker at the scaling text function.

[hdschellnack]

With InDesign, btw, you can just copy the Word-Table into the document. It will look exactly like it does in Word (if you didn't do too much fancy stuff in Word) and you can still fully edit it. If you work a lot with tables and would like to get around this a bit quicker, I'd recommend Smart Styles from Woodwing, a tool any InDesign user should give a look, it's quite productive.

[aschmidt]

thanks for the tip, HD, that could come in handy.

[aschmidt]

i think my original question should've been, can i make table styles in inDesign, as i can in frameMaker (without that handy plugin HD mentions)? frameMaker has lots of issues as a design tool but it can do some pretty amazing stuff for big documents that i'm trying now to figure out how to do in inDesign. another example is dynamic auto footers that read off headings on a page? is that possible? sorry if this is the wrong place for this question.