CatBase Blog

With CatBase you can create some very cool InDesign tables! Here’s an example from a stationery catalogue that was created with CatBase:

How does it do that?
In CatBase, you create Table Styles to specify the basic characteristics of a table: whether it has a header row, borders, row and column fills, etc. But the Table Styles options are limited to what you can do with InDesign tables. However, with CatBase you can also choose the styling for each column …

Publishing Style Sheets are where you go in CatBase to specify what data you want to publish and how you want it sorted and formatted. You can select a Table Style for a particular paragraph, and then you just need to tell CatBase what’s going to go into each column in the table. For the example shown above, we first created a Table Style called Matrix. We then set up a new Publishing Style Sheet and created a Paragraph for the table data. In the Preferences for that Paragraph we selected the option to create a table and selected the Matrix Table Style. We then added one Element for each column that will comprise the table, ending up with a Paragraph containing seven Elements:

Each Element will become a column in the table.
In each of those Elements we went to the Tables tab and chose various settings such as the column heading, style, width, and fill colour:

All that remained then was to publish the data! When it was placed in our InDesign template, the table was automatically formatted exactly as required.

See some videos about publishing data with CatBase!