New Xara Tables - Challenge 1 - Table Cell Banding

Not everyone will have the current Xara Pro+ capability to work with the integrated Table Tool but many can still create such tables from the Online Content Catalogue and so can join in these Challenges.
The approaches will be different but skills developed will be transferrable so not wasted.

Challenge 0 is to create 1x1 square Cell table of side 100px.
The point of this is to show Xara now has a Tool that allows precise construction.

The main challenge is to discover the simplest approach or shape that allows you to produce coloured cell patterns be they chessboard or zebra striping:

Attachment 132715

Create a modestly sized Table - mine is 17x6 - make your big enough so you don't just select groups of Cells and colour.
In other words, can your solution scale?

Challenge 1 - Recreate the colouring for the Tables with Green/White Cells.

This challenge is not simple for earlier XDA versions for the Chessboard patterning.

Acorn

The old fashioned way: create a 100px times 100px square, give the background a named colour (or colours) and the text a style; soft-group, clone 9 times to create 10 in a row, distribute centres horizontally. Select all and clone again for two columns and repeat the process as required, could use distribute vertically as required to tidy up

Attachment 132716

Attachment 132717

Freedom to change the cell colour by name, text style and size (select all soft-group for cell size change) - a tad cumbersome maybe but it works.

Gary, I concede your solution works.

To make it scale I would use Smart Duplication and create two alternating rows or columns and drag out or remove new rows or columns to any quantity and the checkerboard follows automatically as SD handles objects two deep.

Where it gets messy is adding Cell contents that exceed the current size; there is no automatic scaling.
OCC Tables and the new Table Tool handle this.

I know that you have used Themed Colours so you can reverse the Cell colours.
If you hadn't, your method gets a bit more messy.

By definition, it has to be the most versatile as you have no real constraints.

Acorn

Sorry Acorn, I just can't get my head around this table tool. I much prefer to create a table ad-hoc. I find with the table tool I'm constantly looking for 'fart and give us a clue' menu items that I can't find. I'm spending more time trying to change things via the table menu than I would just creating my own vector table.

I did challenge 0 and here's the result but I'm far from impressed.

Quote:

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I find with the table tool I'm constantly looking for 'fart and give us a clue' menu items that I can't find.

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Waxing eloquent. :)

@Egg, the aha! discovery for Challenge 1 I was hoping people might find is Paste Attributes.

What Xara has done is dropped the prior OCC table complexities where a Smart Table as made up of a number of components that were impossible to associate together in the Page & Layer gallery.

Now there is a better underlying structure in that a Table has one or many Rows with each Row having one or many Cells. Each vertically adjacent Cell is deemed to be in a Column.

Table has Padding between Cells that can is the same for Row and column. Xara calls this 'Spacing' and is the first input box on the Table Menu.
The Padding can have an applied Colour. Xara calls the the 'Table Background Colour'. This is the first dropdown on the Table Menu.

Selecting Cells within the Table Tool is as follows:

• (Right-)Click on a Cell selects it.
  
  • Right-Click open the context menu with operations on Rows, Columns and Borders.
  • A Cell Padding dot marker appears top-left.
  • The Table Menu makes the Row and Column Deletion menu items active; these show as an X with a row or column adjacent.
  
  
• Ctrl-Click on a selected Cell deselects it.
• Repeated Ctrl-Clicks in different Cells select them
• Shift-Click on two different Cells selects all Cells in that block.
• Hover-Click in the grey border selects the entire Row or Column.
• Shift-Hover-Click is harder to describe but it remembers the last Cell selected and selects all Rows or Columns down to the Shift-Hover-Click position.

When a Row or Column is Shift-Hover-Selected a Delete (Cross in a Circle) button appears and when click the selection is removed and the Table reformed.

Cell sizing can be achieved by Hover-Click Drag with the thin Blue Line between Cells.
More accurate sizing can be input for the current selection in the Change row height or Change column width boxes; these affect all the Cells in a Row or Column.

Realising operations are applied to the selection, Row(s), Column9s) or table make the Table Cell Borders Dialog a bit more understandable.
In essence you can change the top, bottom, left & right borders individually from a single Cell through all selected Cell permutations. The borders affected are controlled by what you pick from the Border Filter buttons.
The choices you make and the order they are applied is a thing you have to plan and is probably no better or worse than MS Work or Excel.

How you present each Border edge of style, thickness and colour is straightforward.

Back to Challenge 1.
This is where the power of the new Table structure emerges.
You can define a small pattern of Cells as a Table template.
You Copy this and then select your actual Table and Paste Attributes: the pattern repeats across and down the table.
You use Paste Attributes as this preserves your data.

I used a single simple pattern to achieve all three of my Challenge 1 patterns.
Have you discovered it yet?

Acorn

My solution for Challenge 1: Attachment 132724

When you make the Reveal layer visible, consider:

1. How can I use this pattern to make a chessboard pattern?
2. What do i do differently for the stripings?

The value of this challenge is in discovering how powerful Paste Attributes of one table to another can be.
Try some simple patterns on the existing OCC Smart Tables.

Acorn