Here’s a handy tip – if you need to bring a table from Microsoft Word into Adobe InDesign, keep the formatting of the table (yes, columns, rows, the whole lot) by placing it (using File>Place) into your document, making sure the ‘Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables’ option is on.
I used to just copy and paste my text in and then reformat it into columns and rows using the ‘Convert Text to Table’ tool – much slower! Watch out though that you don’t import any unwanted Word styles into your InDesign document.
Importing tables into Adobe InDesign
Posted: July 2, 2008 in Adobe InDesignTags: Adobe InDesign, tables
Comments
Design Secrets 
thanks for this tip. i recently had a 60 page booklet to create that was loaded with tables, this saved me hours of tedious work.
keep the great tips and links coming. 😀
Don’t forget that when you’re in the dialog box for “Show Options”, you can choose from the bottom of the Dialog box to “Customise Style Import”
The STYLE MAPPING button is now available.
You can now choose the Word file style and apply the InDesign Style you want (providing you know what each Word Style is).
If your Word Styles are the exact match to InDesign then you don’t need to select the previous. You can ignore it and InDesign will use it’s own styles instead of Word’s.
If you find that your Word styles have gotten completely messy: Open a new Indesign file, import the Word file and then export it immediately to .RTF file. You do this by selecting all, then File>Export> and choose .rtf from the drop down menu.
Now bring the .rtf file into InDesign and you’ve gotten rid of all the unwanted styles and all the messy styles, it’s completely cleaned and ready to import.