For those of you who’ve ever been disappointed by InDesign’s lack of charting features, Anne-Marie Concepción has a solution in this week’s free InDesign Secrets episode. The Chartwell font (yes, font!) from TK type makes ingenious use of ligatures in order to turn simple text numbers into bars, lines, and pies.

Anne-Marie shows you how to start by typing the mathematical equation that represents your chart numbers. You’ll turn off InDesign’s ligatures at first, then you simply apply variations on the Chartwell font and turn those numbers into corresponding charts when you turn ligatures back on.

So, for example, let’s say I started with this percentage breakdown, typed into InDesign, set in Chartwell with ligatures turned off, and each of the different values styled in a different color:

If I set the Chartwell option to the Pies font style, the result is an automatic transformation into a pie chart that’s set to those percentages:

Tip: In the video Anne-Marie explains how to turn your pie chart into the ring chart on the right by adding an alphabetical character to the equation.

If I change the font family to Bars and put spaces after each plus sign, the result is a bar graph:

Note: I changed each of the values by a factor of 10 to make a better visual example. Also, if you try this step, add a plus sign after the final value to keep the spacing (which is, of course, actually leading) between your bars consistent.

Finally, I can change the font family to Lines to get what Anne-Marie accurately points out is really an Area Chart.

Tip: Add a 1+ to the beginning of your equation for a line chart so that your graph has a starting point. (Unfortunately, the more accurate value of 0 won’t work properly.)

Anne-Marie has some other handy Chartwell tips for applying color quickly with the use of a nested character style and using InDesign’s story editor to quickly make adjustments to your charts without having to turn ligatures on and off.

Meanwhile, for lynda.com members, Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner, has a new exclusive movie in the Online Training Library®. This week David shows another time-saving trick: using the eyedropper tool to pick up text formatting and apply it elsewhere in your document.

And Anne-Marie and David will be back in two weeks to reveal more secrets of InDesign.

Interested in more?
• All the InDesign Secrets in the Online Training Library®
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion the Online Training Library®
• Courses by David Blatner the Online Training Library®
• Courses on InDesign the Online Training Library®

Tags: Anne-Marie Concepción, Chartwell, David Blatner, InDesign, InDesign Secrets

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