Multi-page Tables

[JM1]

I have been delaying the layout of my next book. Previous ones have been in Indesign. I had hoped to do the next on in Publisher. The book includes a lot of tabular data. It is still the case that tables cannot span pages? If so, I have no choice but to do the next one in InDesign.

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, JM1 said:

It is still the case that tables cannot span pages?

Yes, in the retail release. I don't know if it is possible in the 2.6 beta.

[MikeTO]

Table spanning is not in 2.6.

[MikeTO]

You can create a table for the header row and first row - finalize the formatting with these two rows. Cut it to the clipboard. Draw a text frame the size of the page. Paste the table inline. Paste a second copy inline and delete the header row from it.

Copy this single row table to the clipboard. Paste as many copies as you require rows. The text frame will become overset. Auto Flow the text frame and you'll have pages of table rows. If you need to edit a row, the following tables will reflow automatically. If you need to add or delete a row you can do so and all the rest will flow automatically.

To have a header at the top of each frame. Make the second and following pages' frames start a bit further down and paste a table header directly above them.

It's a hack but it will work and it's better than nothing.

Although I use lots of tables, they're not real tables, they're just paragraphs with tabs and paragraph decorations. I manually word wrap the text in the "columns". It's a bit of a pain but it's easy compared to writing entire university papers in a line editor on a mainframe. That was not fun.

[lacerto]

Here is another option, where in lack of genuine continuous tables something similar is simulated by using tab separated text (which can be autoflown), a master page with vertical strokes (column separators), and decorations and tab stops defined as part of a paragraph style to define columns and row separators.

"Edit detached" Layer context menu command can afterwards be applied page-wise to clean overflowing vertical separators proceeding from the master (not shown on the video clip but the cleaned Publisher document is attached below, along with a screenshot.)

faketable.afpub

Depending on complexity of data (irregularity of length of data in columns), this may or may not be, a plausible workaround.

UPDATE: Having tab separated data source would also make it easy to preprocess (e.g. format) source data field-wise before placing it in Publisher. E.g., convert the data temporarily to a table and then apply (character style based) formatting to entire column for all records, and then convert back to tab separated data, save in Word format and place in Publisher only after that.