Lessons

Lesson Info

Tabs and Tables

So I set up a file with my tabs here. And when we're dealing with tab items, One of the things we have to make sure is we have our hidden characters turned on option command I and when people normally use tabs in their document, they used tabs when they're placing all of their copy inside a text container and they use the tab Teoh lineup everything. So when they go in there, they just hit Tab Tab Talbot. Make sure that everything lines up and they use the tab key to go ahead and try to line everything up by using as many tabs is necessary. No, no, that's not how it works. It will look good after we go ahead and form at all of our tabs. What we do when we're setting up our content here is if I want to break this up into a nice tab structure, I'm going to separate all of my items by one tab only. You type an item you hit one tab, not 17. Thes aren't Eminem's one. That's it. So copy or select all of my copy in here under the tight menu. We have tabs and my tab Ruler will come up and snap ...

to the top of my text container in here. If I do end up moving by document around my tab, Ruler does not move with it. So he's got this really cool feature at the right hand side of the tab. Ruler, I've got this little magnet that snaps right to by container. If my container is very large and I cannot see the ends of the container on my page, then what's gonna happen is my tab Ruler will not snap to that container, so it will manually have to place it over the top. The way tabs work is we've got four different styles of taps left, right, center, justify and then a line on some little weird thing and left justified tab. Where the arrow is pointing is where everything is going to line up. The tail of the tab is basically where all the copy is going to. Then Flo is a left justified tab, just like left justified. Copy Everything lines up right where the arrow points I have by a line on center. So where ever this is, it's gonna line down the center of my object right justified tab. And then this align on its said as a decimal, it could be aligned on any item whatsoever going to show you all of those. So with my tab ruler in place, my copy selected. And keep in mind that if I don't have my copy selected when I apply these tab delimited is in here. If the copy isn't selected, it's not going to format my coffee. So I'm going to take my left, have ruler, and you can see that I have a tab here and I've got tab through all the spaces. I'm gonna drop my first tab in right about here in my ruler, right above the ruler. And it now becomes clear there is a tab and is going to the one and only tab is then going to go right to where that tab falls. I've got all the other tabs here separating my elements there, and I've told the first have been the Siri's is going to fall with my first delimit er. I'm going to drop another tab in my ruler and then the third tab anywhere that I want, Teoh. And now you can see how this works every time you hit your tab key, it will then go to the first tab will go to the first delimit er Second tab will go to the 2nd 1 The 3rd 1 will go to the third tab delimited. Now this is a really quick and easy way to just kind of do kind of like a grid structure here, and you'll notice that this has a tab before my copy because I wanted these headlines to come up in lineup. If I did not put a tab before there, it's not going to go ahead and line up of the first tab. If I hit multiple tabs, the more tabs fight create, then it's going to go from the first tab to the second tab to the third tap. This is why I only put in one tab and one tab only if I wanted to go right to the very end. Aiken do lots of tabs, but we don't go in and formatted toe look nice. First we get our tabs in place and then reformat it. It's just a typical little list of things right here, and I've got all my tabs in there. Everything lines up very nicely left justified, left justified, left justified. And I can pull those out as well and make those. So we got more space in there to really weird redraw thing or it disappears. Okay. Anyway, never saw that before. Still works just fine. Them whatever, It'll be fine. So I can set this all wherever I'd like to put this. I've got my ruler here so I can actually measure everything to make sure everything falls into place. But I actually have another cool method if I want to go with and I want to place my tabs at very specific points I can go. And I can place my first tab. Say it two inches, and I want one every two inches. After that, I can pull my tabs off here just by clicking on these tabs and pulling them off. And I put a tab in here at first. Go to my little tab cheese grater and I can repeat that tab time and time again. So if I do that, I can have one of two inches one at four inches, one at six inches. And of course I need to extend my container here But if I want to do a tab every inch, I put it in the first inch and I just say, Repeat that tab so I can have that in multiple places. Just click and drag wherever you would like to put those in and drop them in your ruler. If you have lots of tabs up here, you can click on each one and snap them off the tab ruler just by clicking and dragging it off. If you've got lots of them, you can always go in and delete all of your tabs in your ruler so that it's you can go ahead and place them differently. Generally left justified tabs everything line up here. I want to align all these down the center of my columns, though, so I could go on the tab. The limiter. Here's it's highlighted in blue. Zoom in, kind of hard to see. I must switch this over to centered. Now everything is gonna be center directly on that tab there. If I choose a right justified tab than the right hand side of all, my copy will be lined up here, and I know somebody had asked Well, what happens when you have copy that you want to have, like, back to back with each other. Well, this is one of the ways that you could go and you could left justify a section here and right justify a section there without creating two separate containers and putting the two containers having one right justified one left, justified copy and put the two containers together. I can do this in one container using tabs. Was it that back upto left justify that one as well and that all the left justify a little bit of space. So basic tabs. But that's not all tabs can do because tabs are rockin awesome. I'm gonna go down to my chapter. And of course, when you're doing chapters in books, what you normally do is you go in and you the little engine that could and you keep doing it until all the letters go over the right hand side and all the letters just kind of kind of sort of don't line up at the end, right? And then you have to fuss with all the spacing. Now, this is what tabs air for. So with this, I'm going to select my copy in this container. Click on the little magnet on my tab ruler. So it snaps to what I'm doing. I want all of my page numbers tow line up on the right hand side. So I've put one tab in here between my chapter in my page number and choose my right hand tab. I dropped it in there where I would like it to be all my page. Love numbers are gonna line up pretty amazing, huh? They've never lined up before. Now they line up on the right hand side. But what I want to do is I would like to fill this space in between here with something. And that space is where I'm going to go in. I'm gonna put my leader. I need to have my tab. The limiter checked right there. So it's highlighted. And then the leader box will become available. And I can type in any, um, character that I would like to repeat. I just put in a period at a hit return, and we'll go through it will repeat that character so it'll fill the whole thing. I don't like those dots. Those dots are too close together. Not a problem. I can go into my leader here, and I can type in maybe a space and then a dot hit return. A little funky thing with this. A lot of times, you have to put it in there and hit return and get hit. Return again. Sometimes it takes it sometimes it doesn't. I've noticed that there's been a consistent issue right there so I can put the leader in there. If I put several spaces and they do the leader, it will just give me several spaces between there. Okay. Pretty awesome. Yes, Very, very cool stuff. Another option that I really like about this for people who know tabs. They probably don't know this about tabs. So I've got my little leaders in between there, and I would like Teoh go in, and I would like to make them smaller. I'd like to make them a different color light in them or something. Maybe pride. I'm a little of that little salt and pepper. Whatever. What do you want to know? If I want to reduce the size, I could go and I can reduce the size of the leader or change the color here. And if I want to reproduce that through all of them. I can copy this leader from here and just double click and paste that leader into every single one here. It doesn't matter when I copy and paste, because all it's doing is just repeating and filling that space. So if I were a short leader, a long leader in a copy and paste, it simply fills that entire space as it goes. Not bad. You're not bad at all. But wait, there's even more we get down. Teoh, remember those business reply cards that you rip out of all those magazines when you get them? Well, who makes those? Well, this is how they make them Now. I always like to do this because this is the hysterical part of going in and doing Sampson. People will totally no one understand this when you want to go in and you want to do a business reply card or a form and you want to feel these items out here. Of course, what people do is they go in, they draw lines and they don't quite draw the lines completely straight, and they put them in there and then they kind of extend beyond the edge of the box because they can't quite get it right. So then you take your box and you put it over there. But you make sure that your boxes filled with white so it covers it all up. Yes. And then So you put your box at the end, and then you take your other white box at the end here and you cover it up right there. And that way, Now you've got your your lines that aren't quite straight, because you've got to hold down your shift key and you got your white boxes at the end covering up all the that you got everything and you're like, Wow, this is great. Group it all together and you hope that nobody has to go in and change it. Exactly. That's exactly how it happens, folks. Well, that's nice, but it's really pretty awful. But I've seen people do that. This is where tabs come in now. We could use paragraph rules under here if we wanted to underline the entire paragraph. But that's gonna also underlined the name and the address as well. Unless we indented a certain distance. So Yep. I could do rules underneath here, but I actually want the leader. I just kind of give it away to be filling into the space next to it. So I want to actually create that four minute area. So after each one of my items, I will simply enter in a tab character by clicking on my tab. Key will highlight all of that. Snap my tab Ruler to here. I would like all my fill spaces Teoh right here in about five inches. And then I'm going to fill that space with Justin Underscore because it simply gets repeated throughout. So I want to go into my leader and I do the underscore there and hit return. It feels that space with this course, these could be included in a paragraph style because one of the things that a paragraph style has when we go in to do that, we have our tabs and we can set our tabs anywhere that we want Teoh in here so that it be in this place filled with this so I can actually include this as an actual paragraph style. I don't have to do this manually every time because paragraph styles, every time I hit my return key. I get a new paragraph, and tabs are one of those things could be included. One interesting thing with going in and filling us with a leader, though, is in some cases the Nashes will look like they're not quite spaced appropriately. So we get those team little ends right there. It's not really noticeable on some fonts, but other funds you can tell. Yeah, you know it's not not quite right, not a problem, because I know I could go in and I could just double click, and I could. Current knows tighter, together, off track them like a new option left arrow here. And another thing that people will also see is this at the very beginning of this right here in tabular, out of the way. When I use this leader method and I fill it with an underscore, what happens sometimes is the space between the colon and the actual underlying here varies. See, it's fairly tight here. It's fairly loose here. The reason why is the underscores a certain width, and it's going to fill the space, and if I begin to track everything little bit tighter, I'll bring it together, and then all of a sudden the line will seem to get longer because it can fit another one in. So if I do that, I begin to tighten that up. Even though in tightening it up, it looks like it's, you know, going the opposite direction. I'm tightening it up and it's filling in that extra space. Bring everything together. And now and then it has been room for another one. So with this, it requires a little bit of extra. So do that. So now my lines are going to be consistently spaced here, right up against the very edge of my selection. And then I get consistency. That's something that you have to kind of do manually on there. And now I've got that all set nice part about this is it's all part of the type container. So when I go in and adjust my leading and my point size, it all stays right with it. Then I could always go in to call up my tab. Ruler Shift Command T. If I want a short knows us well, I could do that. Everything is done beautifully. If I do say so myself another way working with tabs. And this is a method where we can go in and we can line things up left and right justified. But I also want to show you the align on feature. So Tab selected here, If I go in, I put a right justified tab right here is going to bring everything out. I'm actually gonna put a tab in here to begin with, because I want to be able to line up my first set of copy and my second set of copy. So I'm going to put my first tab right here. I'm gonna grab my second tab, and I'm gonna put it right here, and it's gonna line up everything so I can line everything back to back right there. Got an extra tab in there that I don't want to have someone take that out of there. And now I can line these things back to back. What happens, though? If I want a line on a particular character so I can align on a decimal point or get a line on a comma or a dollar sign? I wanted to align very specifically so I can choose my line on little button here so I can say, OK, a line on something. So if I align on the dollar sign, I can just put that dollar signs in their right there and say, a line on the dollar side course I have to have all my copy selected in order for that to happen. If I don't have it selected, its not gonna be applied. I can have a line in the dollar side. What happens if I want to align on something like the number six, the type of the number six right there? It's going to a line on the number six every place where it finds the number six. It aligns right there. If there is no Number six, it all happens before working a line on the desk mall, the calm of the period, things like that. Or if I'm dealing with, you know, money. I can align on the decimal so they can have long number short numbers. But the decimal will always line up perfectly. If I align on a particular feature over here by Alanis aligned on this and say a line in the letter E, then every single one of these has e in there. And sure enough. Look at that. There's the letter e and the lines right down on the letter E. So lots of different things that I can do with tabs.