How do I convert tables from Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel into Adobe InDesign

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Course contents
SECTION: 4
PROJECT 3: Company Newsletter/Brochure 1:31:36
SECTION: 5
PROJECT 4: Long Business Document 1:46:26

Questions

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Course info

82 lessons / 7 hours 4 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan. I am a graphic designer and Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI)  for InDesign.

Together we will work through real life projects starting with a simple company flyer, then a brochure & a company newsletter. We’ll make business cards & take control of a really long annual report.

We will work with colour, picking your own and also using corporate colours. You will explore how to choose & use fonts like a professional. We will find, resize & crop images for your documents.

There are projects for you to complete, so you can practise your skills & use these for your creative portfolio.

In this course I supply exercise files so you can play along. I will also save my files as I go through each video so that you can compare yours to mine - handy if something goes wrong.

Know that I will be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

I will share every design trick I have learnt in the last 15 years of designing. My goal is for you to finish this course with all the necessary skills to start making beautiful documents using InDesign.


What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign CC 2018 or above. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.
  • No previous design skills are needed.
  • No previous InDesign skills are needed.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 76 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.
  • You'll learn to design a flyer, newsletter, brochure, annual report & business cards.
  • Learn how to create PDF files ready for printing.
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind.
  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.
  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers.
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts.
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.

What is the target audience?

  • No previous InDesign experience is necessary.
  • This course is for people completely new to InDesign. No previous design or publishing experienced is necessary.
  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce most common publications. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.

Course duration 6 hours 20 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

How to earn your certificate

Work your way towards your certificate for this course by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz (Merit level courses only)
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project (Distinction level courses only) - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Request your certificate when you've completed the requirements for the certificate level you're working towards

Good luck!

Pass certificates

We’re awarding ‘Pass’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Pass’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when all your projects are complete

Good luck!

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

So that we don't mess up our lovely long document, we're going to do this exercise in a new document, just a blank one. Just to keep it separate. Because we need lots of versions of it, and we got not a lot of space to do it in the other document.

So, what I need to do is, show you the different ways that you can bring in tables into Word. Most of the times they'll come through, and just be fine. So if I go to 'File', 'Place'-- we'll use 'Table Example Word 1'. Make sure you're doing it from Word first, click 'Open'. And we'll click and drag it out, and the table was perfect in Word, so it's come through perfect in InDesign. So no real drama's there. Where the dramas do happen, if I go to 'File', 'Place' now, and bring in the example of Word 2, and I drag this out, this can happen. And it still looks fine, but it's not a table, it's been done with tabs. So there's no actual tables to put the lines through. It's actually just, people have gone through, gone to here, and hit tab to separate them out. That's fine, but formatting becomes a little bit hard because it's not a table. It's easy to adjust with table.

Select all the bits you want to be in a table. So I've just highlighted them all. Go to 'Table', 'Convert Text to Table'. By default it's using the Column Separator as the 'Tab'. You might have commas, or something else, I'm going to click 'OK'. And hey presto, it's a table. I might have to do some adjustments, just to tidy that in. That needs to be a little bit smaller, and that needs to be a bit bigger, So you can mess around with it like we did in the previous example. So, I'm going to put him over here.

Another example that might come through from Word is either the table's not set up right in Word, and it comes through a bit weird or you copy, and paste it, so I'm going to open up that example. So this is my 'Table Example Word 2', I'm just going to copy it and paste it in, this happens. So the tab's there, but InDesign hasn't converted them nicely. It works just the same as the last example. Select everything that you want to be part of this table, go to 'Table', 'Convert Text to Table', it's the same. The tab is separating them, and it comes back to looking good again. We can go through and play with the lines between them and the style formatting like we did in the previous exercise.

Last one we'll do is - I'm just going to move him off to the side - is getting it from Excel. Same process as Word. 'File', 'Place', and there's one in here called 'Table Example Excel 1'. I'm going to click and drag it out. And it comes through with the same kind of problem. This is our Excel file, you need a course in Excel, I've got one, I've also got one in Word as well, if you want to check that out. I'm going to select all of these. So this is what happens when you place from Excel. It does this kind of weird tab thing as well. But I can fix it just like I did with Word. 'Convert Text to Table', and we're away again.

The nice thing about Excel though is, let's say it's a monthly thing. It's a revenue report, or sales report, or something you go through, and you format it, and you spend ages making it look nice. We'll do a little bit of formatting. We'll do 'Alternating Fills'. Every other row, skip the first row even. So we've got this, and we've done some formatting to it. Terrible formatting, I know. But let's say, when I update it now, instead of importing it and then saving table styles, and all sorts of advanced stuff, you can just jump to Excel, and let's say this is the data for another month or just been adjusted, or-- let's say it was a financial data, changing every month. Instead of having to go and re-import it, and style it, just select all the bits you want to change. Hit 'Copy', so 'Edit', 'Copy' in Excel. Then jump into InDesign, and what you're going to do is select the whole table. Or select everything you've copied. If you're only going to select the whole table, and hit 'Paste' and you'll notice that it goes from height, and just adjusts, but it also retains all the style that we've done.

So any changes that get made, you can go and adjust. Now, this is true if it's just one file. So say you've got red here-- I'm going to go through, and it's all red. I can select this whole column, so 'Color' all the way down, click 'Copy'. Go to InDesign, click in this, there's a little arrow at the top here. To get that whole column, hit 'Paste'. As long as these match up we're copying and pasting, and it will update, and retain the InDesign styles. Super awesome. All right, so that is a few different ways to work with tables when coming from different Microsoft platforms. Let's move on to the next video.

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