Multi-colored Strokes in an InDesign Table

I picked up a cool technique the other day while visiting a German InDesign blog run by Tim Gouder. Tim collects interesting InDesign related articles and posts them on his blog InDesign-blog.de. And he was kind enough to let me translate the following technique to English and get the word out to the rest of the InDesign community.

If you’re experienced with using InDesign tables you know that sometimes you have to be creative when working on the style and formatting of the table cells. And this is one of those little tricks you can use to give your tables that little something extra. In the example below, notice the double colored column strokes? Pretty cool huh!

Notice the blue-green column strokes?

Applying this stroke requires you to do some prep work using the Strokes panel. So first open up the Strokes panel, then click the panel menu and choose Stroke Styles.

Create a new Stripe stroke, then move the stroke “slicer” to 50%. Set a 50% width here to give the stroke the same overall thickness in both colors. Give it a proper name and click OK.

Select your table columns and apply your new stroke, then give it a color and increase the stroke weight to make it more apparent. Notice you’re actually applying half a stroke here that is blank on one side? This makes sense since you just created a stroke that was only filled halfway.

Now head back over to the Strokes panel. Choose a different swatch for the Gap Color and InDesign will apply it to the other side of your stroke.

Just like when you apply a gap color to a dashed stroke, InDesign fills in the empty area of your striped stroke. And because you’re using basic formatting options, you can create a cell style to apply multi-colored strokes whenever you want them.