Tables from MS Word?

[Paul Harris]

Greetings to the forum:

I'm using the CS1 Suite on a Mac. I deal with tables a lot, and get a
lot of tables already laid out by clients in the Word table editor.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, I simply format them to my specs in
Word, then save them as PDFs to be place into InDesign.

Since this has been my workflow for a long while, I'm comfortable with
it, but I'm worried that perhaps I'm missing some efficiencies by not
investigating the table function built into InDesign. I know that
InDesign is also supposed to be able to import Word tables in native
format, but I've never found that this feature worked well.

One of the downsides of this process is that even with no colour
elements, the PDFs produced from the Word tables end up as RGB
documents. This is usually OK, as much of my work is greyscale, and the
RBG gets converted in the RIP, but if colour separations are involved,
then I have to perform the additional process of opening each PDF in
Illustrator, then saving as a greyscale CMYK document.

Any ideas on this, or advice on how to improve the process, would be
appreciated.

Many thanks.

Paul Harris
Word Works Typographic

[mhari@ihug.com.au]

Hi Paul,

I find it works well to save the table in word as a normal word doc,
and place in indesign. The table then becomes an indesign table and
can easily be edited. If the table doesn't look exactly as expected,
you can convert the table back to text (table menu) and double check
how the table is made up (tabs separate cells, returns separate
columns), and tweak it.

If you are having to go back to word and make a new pdf with every
change, using indesign tables will speed up your workflow.

Hope this helps.

Mhari