Create additional column

Question

I have no experience or training in Illustrator and am trying, with the aid of  Classroom in a Book to pick it up as I go along.  I have a table with several columns.  I need to add an additional one.  I'm thinking I'd do that by using Area Type Options but every time I click on Type, Area Type Options is always greyed out.  What am I doing wrong, not doing?
All advice much appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

I have a table with several columns.
When discussing Illustrator (or any program, really), it's really important to carefully state what kind of objects you are actaully describing. There is no "table" object in Illustrator. You may have AreaType objects or PointType objects or PathType objects arranged in columns or rows. If they are PathType or AreaType objects, they may or may not be Threaded so that continuous text auto-flows between them. You may have a "single" AreaType object spit into columns and rows (which is really nothing more than multiple threaded AreaType objects with a "live" edtiability regarding the number of columns and rows and their spacing).
Illustrator's convoluted and problematic text handling is very outdated, very poor, and is probably the worst program in the world for creating what most people mean by a textual or data "table." It provides no end-of-column character, so if text is threaded, you can't properly force continuous text to jump to the next threaded "cell" (text object) before you reach the text-content limits of the object. (In fact, Illustrator's Find & Replace feature doesn't even provide a special character to facilitate searches for hard returns!)
In threaded PathType objects, a hard or soft return will cause threaded text to jump to the next object, but that, of course, makes it impossible to use hard or soft returns normally within a single "cell" of the "table" you try to build that way.
In any proper table feature, ordinary tab-delimited text automatically flows into the row/column cells. Good luck on trying to make that happen in AI.
The only decent way to make a textual table of continuous text in Illustrator is by using paragraph styles with Tabs set to delineate columns. But again Illustrator falls short because there is no way for tab stops except the last one to allow for differing numbers of lines. (Even Adobe InDesign has this problem.) So using paragraph styles and tabs, whenever you need an inner column cell to contain additional lines is to resort to entering the additional lines in what what would really be additional "rows" (paragraphs), and tab-tab-tabbing to the appropriate "column."
Despite Illustrator's unnecessary feature glut complication, the only decent way to fake a proper text table (one that allows for automatic content-driven row height in any column) in Illustrator is to just arrange a bunch of un-threaded text objects in a grid, key text into them individually, and manually adjust their height or spacing as needed for multiple lines in a "cell" of a "row." Utterly lame.
I need to add an additional one.
You can add a column to an AreaType object, since that's the only kind of threaded text construct in AI that has any "live" editability. But doing so will cause the threaded text to reflow in the new order. So you can't, for examle, insert an additonal column between existing columns and have the text of existing columns stay where it should be, as is possible in any proper table feature.
If your "table" is a bunch of individual threaded AreaType objects, then you could marquee select the existing columns to the right of where you want the new column, drag them rightward, create a new column of text objects in the vacated space. But then you'd have to tedously re-llink the flow order.
So again: In short, don't expect anything like a conventional-wisdom text table functionality in Illustrator. It isn't there.
In FreeHand, Adobe owns an innovative and elegant text-handling feature which allows you to set continuous text in a table fashion using nothing but paragraph styles. The elegantly unobtrusive feature is a Wrapping Tab stop. Using that feature, you can make any tab stop(s) in continuous paragraphical text automatically accommodate as many lines as needed. Adobe would do very well to incorporate this feature in all of its text-handling applications, including InDesign. With this feature and support for inline graphics (which Illustrator also still does not support), you don't even need an old-fashioned "tables" feature. This feature has existed in FreeHand for something like 15 years. That's just one example of how antequated Adobe Illustrator really is.
JET