Insert tabular data

EasyCatalog makes inserting tabular data into your document as easy as 1, 2, 3…

Simple tables

1. In the EasyCatalog panel select the records and fields that you want to insert into the table. The order of the fields and records will be the same as shown in the panel, so ensure you’ve used EasyCatalog’s powerful sorting and filtering features to arrange the data in the order you’d like it to appear in the document.
2. Ensure you have a valid text insertion point in the document. If the insertion point is within an existing table, the selected records and fields will be used to populate the it; otherwise a new table will be created.
3. Hit the ‘Insert’ button at the bottom of the panel.

Prototyped tables

1. Design a prototype that shows EasyCatalog how you need your table to appear. This table prototype can either be stored in an InDesign document or an EasyCatalog Library. Field Specifiers, which are place-holders for field content, are used where your data should appear.
2. Select the records and fields in the panel that you want to use to populate the table.
3. If your table prototype is on the document, drag to records to the page; if the prototype is stored in an EasyCatalog library, simply drag the library item to the page and it will be populated with the selected records.

Designing the table prototype

Complex, stylized, tables can be created by showing the plug-in how the table should look and where each field should appear.

The number of rows in the table will be increased or reduced to accommodate the amount of data being used to populate the table. Where field content should appear, EasyCatalog’s Field Specifiers are used — these are placeholders that define both the name of the field and the style it should appear in.

EasyCatalog Table Attributes

EasyCatalog includes powerful table attributes to allow your table to adapt to the data being used to populate it:

1. Group header and footer rows: The structure of your data, as shown by the EasyCatalog panel, can also be represented in your document tables by defining rows that should appear at the head and foot of each group.
2. Cell merging: Cells can be merged horizontally and vertically if the content of adjacent cells matches exactly.
3. Removing empty columns: Where a column is completely empty after pagination, it can be automatically deleted. Other columns in the table can be set to expand to fill the space left by the deleted column.

The following examples were produced using the same table prototype:

Here the source data contained three price breaks, so table is automatically paginated with three price columns.

Using the same table prototype with data that only contains two price breaks, the third pricing column (’10+’) has been automatically removed and the width of the ‘Description’ column has been adjusted to fill the space left by the deleted column.