Restaurant Menu Design in Adobe InDesign

2.3 Using Tables in InDesign

Hi there, and welcome back to this course. Many designers are not aware that InDesign has the ability to create tables. So in this lesson, we will touch on how to create tables and how you can modify them to what you need. Tables are very useful when you want to set up content pages, financial statements, or anything really that requires multiple columns and rows. So let's take a look. Let's unlock the layers and move some of these items away. Press Cmd+T to activate the menu item text box. Let's get rid of the content. Head over to Table > Insert Table. And here's where we can dictate how many rows and columns we want. So body rows are the ones that go horizontal and columns go vertical. For this menu, I want four body rows and two columns. So the program already inserts the table into the text box. Let's open our table panel, head over to Window, type in Tables > Table. Select the whole table, in here on the table panel you can change the size, the amount of rows if you wanna add more or you wanna take some out. We have the At Least option, which means that you can change either the height or the width of the cell to be at least for example 10 millimeters. And that will modify it to be at least that size. Here I'll select the right side column, and this column will be designated for the price. So, since I don't need that big of a column, I'll change the width to 10 millimeters. You can also modify this with the selection tool. For example, here I want to make the column where the name of the dishes will be, I want to make that wider. So double-click on the vertical line that is between the two columns, and drag towards the right, perfect. Now this table is outlined with a black stroke all around, pretty much every cell. To modify that, select the whole table, head to the Options bar. In here you will see a diagram of a table. It won't be exactly the same amount of rows and columns, but it will be a diagram of a simplified table. Here you have the option to select or deselect the size of a cell and the size of a table. So in this case I want to select all of the edges, and set the stroke color to none, and there we have it. So now we don't have any strokes around. Now let's say that you want strokes only in between the cells. So select only the middle stroke, and set the color to black, and that's how you have strokes in between the cells. So I'll press Cmd+Z here to go back a step. Now it's time to add some content. So since we don't have any content, we'll use some Lorem Ipsum. Press T on your keyboard or select the text tool from the toolbar. Draw a text box outside the page, right-click, and select Fill with Placeholder Text. In here we will just copy and paste some fake names for the dishes. I want to style this already on the menu items styles, so we don't have to change things. Once they are already into the table, select here Cmd+C and Cmd+V, to paste the text. And we will add some random prices here. Here, I'll select the whole column, head over to Paragraph Styles and select the Menu Price. And that will style it instantly. Perfect, another option that the Tables option gives us is to alter the inside from all around the cell. So for example, let's go here to the Tables panel, select the table. Now we'll select the first column only. Now let's head over to the bottom of the Table panel. Here we can change the inset of how deep into the cell you want the text to be. You can also change the position of the text. If you want it to appear right at the top or right in the middle of the cell, at the bottom, or if you have more text to be spread out through the whole cell. For this course I want it to be aligned to the center. Now I will select the price column, and we can do the same thing. You can do this, you can change these options as a table. I'm just doing it separately so you can see the options. And that's it, that is how you add tables in InDesign. They are really, really useful if you're trying to set up a menu template, where people have to input the name of their dishes, and they want to change them. This will keep an even space throughout the whole design. Tables also come in use for when you're creating contents pages, financial statements, there are many uses for them. Since we have all of our elements ready, in the next lesson we will finish adding up the rest of the sections and complete the design. I'll see you there.