Now, there are a lot of different ways to use tabs but one of the most common uses is for financial data. Let us scroll this document down a little bit so that we can see the tabs palette right next to our data that we are formatting with tabs and using the second tab stop, we will experiment with some of the other tab options.
Right now, we are using a left justified tab. We can change that just with a click to a centered justified tab and all we have to do is have tabs palette selected and click the tabs style. You can also make that a right justified tab which will align every thing to the right of that and again as you move the tab, you will see the text reflow.
The last option is a decimal aligned tab which is pretty neat because I can set that to align on. In this case, a decimal will make pretty good sense or I can also align it on, for example a dollar sign and all the dollar signs will align.
You can really customize that how ever you would like. So, if I decide to align this last tab on a decimal that means all of my financial will line up but in this case, this word free looks a little funny. So, I might want to select that individually just for that line and set that to be right aligned, center aligned or left aligned.
In this case, it looks really good center aligned with all the other texts. Now, I am going to select all these texts again and we want to introduce the concept of a tab leader. So, with this tab up here selected, what we want to do is add a leader that would be for example, a sequence of periods or dots that will fill up the space between one column of information and the next column.
So, if I type a period in there as the tab leader, you will see that we have a sequence of periods filling up that empty space between the two bits of tax. Again, tab leaders are really helpful for financial information. They are also great on restaurant menus and so on. You get the idea.
In this example, I chose a period as a tab leader but you could really choose whatever you want. For example, you could use hyphens, dashes, periods, bullets. You can even use letters and numbers. You can even use up to eight different characters all as one repeating tab later.
Now, just because you can does not mean you should. Obviously, you will choose something that is appropriate to the tax and the formatting of your document.
Now, the last choosing we should address in terms of tabs is the ability to delete tabs. If I want to take a tab and insert an extra one here and change my formatting according to that, maybe I am not so crazy about that result. If I want to delete that tab, all I have to do is select the tab and drag it up and away from the ruler and that tab disappears and it defaults back to the next tab in the sequence.
The other option that you should be aware of, you are going to make sure all my text is selected here, just go to the fly out menu in the tabs palette and click clear all. If I am kind of going crazy with my tabs and I want to change my mind start over, I can just choose clear off on the fly out menu and start again.
So, obviously tabs can be pretty helpful but if you are using a lot of them, I encourage you again to check out the table section later in this training video for different approach that might make your job a little bit easier.
So, now we have covered some basic editing techniques inside of InCopy and the next thing we are going to get to is actually formatting your text so that it is ready for print production workflow.
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