Here’s a little tip that you’ll probably never need, but the day you do it will save you hours!

We were recently working in at Taylor O’Brien on an absolute screamer for a new client of theirs. We knew in advance that the copy would be changing up to the very last minute. The client is a high profile, high quality brand, it had to absolutely bang on and there was no wiggle room.

The problem was the copy had to overlay a grid panel, that panel would have to increase or decrease in size to match the length of the copy, and there had to be a white border surrounding the entire grid.

We could have gone with a single .ai file of the basic grid with enough divisions to suit the largest use case, and then put the stroke on the content box. This can be really fiddly to get absolutely right, and, as the final printout was around 3 meters square, even if we were a fraction out it would be glaringly obvious.

Claire however came up with an elegant solution – use a table (with no header or footer rows) to form the grid. Set the cell width and cell height to the required grid size (in our case 15mm each). Now, because a table is treated as text in the content box if a row does not fully fit in the space it’s treated as overflow and the whole row disappears! No niggly little line ends to worry about! Then for the white surround border simply select all the visible cells with the text tool, deselect the inner borders on the toolbar and set the border style.

Saved us a whole bucket full of grief.

Oh, and as a side note, with the page full of large tables performance did slow a little with Screen Mode set to Normal, spookily though when set to Preview things sped right back up again!

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