I have been practicing my Quark tables and found some really neat features. I have avoided using this tool in the past because it seemed cumbersome, and I felt that I could create tables more quickly simply by drawing them using picture and text boxes. After experimenting a little bit; however, I am much more excited about creating tables with the Table tool. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of this tool:
Layout
You can highlight a column of cells and link them so that they will act like traditional linked text boxes. This way you can paste a whole column of text from an old table and it will flow from cell to cell – great for converting long textbox columns to a Quark table column (if you try to link cells more than once this option will be grayed out, so make sure do this methodically. As far as I can tell, there is no visual indicator for linked cells):
To change the vertical alignment of a cell, highlight it and press CTRL-M. You can also set the internal padding/margins for the cell here under Text Inset (especially handy for the title and any left justified text):
To make a row taller, press F7 to view guides if you don’t have them on, and select the row edge you want to move using the Text tool:
Shading Rows
To select all of the alternate rows at once so that you can make them gray, make sure the Text tool is selected in the toolbar, and then use the Table pull-down menu and select “Odd” rows, change them to 30% Black, and change the first row back to red for the title:
Borders
You can also use this same menu to select Horizontal Grids, Vertical Grids and Border. Select the Horizontal Grids, press CTRL+M and set the border width to zero under the Grids tab. Then do it again for the Vertical Grids, and then do it one more time to set the Border as well.
To select multiple cells at once, don’t try to use the Shift key like Excel. You just have to click and drag using the Text tool.
Summary
When doing massive spreadsheet style tables like this one, using the Table tool makes it much easier to tweak the column and row widths, the text leading, and to change the horizontal scaling on those long header words and make the headers vertically justified. There will be some adjustment as you become familiar with the process, but the time saved makes all the difference.
