Comments on: Typing Tab in a Table Cell

By: Joy

Joy — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:19:41 +0000

Without tabs in a cell for a table IS a nightmare! Thank God for your help on this! Thanks so much!

By: Lan

Lan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 05:30:49 +0000

Thanks for this! I have been so frustrated by this little conundrum. When doing annual reports it’s essential to be able to tab within a cell.

Thanks guys!

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 03:55:28 +0000

Ya, I use tab in tables for menu design. I need to quickly adjust row height and still have dots in between food title & price.

By: Kathy

Kathy — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 22:31:39 +0000

I use tabs inside of table cells for doing sports team calendars. Inside each cell is the date, the opponent and the time. If I didn’t have tabs in there, it would be a nightmare!

By: TJ

TJ — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:56:06 +0000

Thank you so much. I searched the InDesign help library and couldn’t find the answer. You have made my life sooooooooooo much easier. THANK YOU.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:40:07 +0000

@Michael, please see this other blog post:, regarding making decimal aligned tabs in InDesign tables.

By: Jongware

Jongware — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:38:06 +0000

Michael: the align-to-decimal function is meant to align fractions, so 1.23 will be aligned with 10,254.1. Your decimal comma separators ought to be aligned automatically, even when the number has no period and/or fractional value — on regular numbers it will behave the same as Align Right, and any parentheses will be ignored — the last digit in your number will be used.
So don’t change the Align To character to comma but leave it as a period.

By: Michael Randall

Michael Randall — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:39:56 +0000

I’ve searched high and low on this forum for an answer to the alignment of decimals in a table column, the solution to my issue seems close but I’ve yet to find the definitive answer. I’ve tried all the very good suggestions such as aligning to a tab character, a comma in my case, also using [Tabular Lining] and changing the kerning to metrics, and yes my type is left aligned.
My tables are for Annual Reports where a single column may have small and large numbers and some with brackets and some numbers in bold ie 10,163,090 (1,663,356) 30,250 the font I have to use is Unica (not a nice font). The main issue seems to be when you have multiple decimal places the align to character only works for the first comma.
If align to character is not the answer, should I actually use tabs in the cells and tab between the decimals, hope not as it seems like a lot of work. The data supplied to us comes from Excel and my client sees everything aligned in Excel and wants to know why I can’t recreate the same. Any suggestions would be appreciated

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:00:45 +0000

An “option-tab” is just a regular tab character, so you can search for it with Find/Change (type ^t). If you need to limit it to that character inside a table, you’d have to select the table and then limit the scope to “Selection” in the find/change dialog box.

By: Michelle Jamieson

Michelle Jamieson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:52:45 +0000

Next question – how do you do a find and replace for Opt-Tab?