XML and tables in InDesign

Hi everyone,
I'm just starting to explore the possibilities of XML in InDesign and in need of some general information:
The projects that I'm working with that I think would benefit from the XML workflow are files that include a number of tables (e.g., product names, descriptions, prices, etc. with header rows and some merged cells).
The content of the tables are the same for a brochure-style layout and a poster-style layout but the brochure tables need to be tall and narrow and the poster tables short and wide (basically flipping the axes). So far I've handled this through a complicated dance of exporting the tables as text and using Excel to flip the axes and then import the tables back into InDesign (in order for this to work, I have to un-merge all merged cells and it still isn't perfect but a reasonable starting point).
The editors make changes to the content in InDesign using InCopy (adding or removing rows or columns to add new products and/or prices, etc.)
The poster and brochure versions of the file don't need to be live at the same time--they're used at different times of the year so it's a matter of loading the final brochure content into the poster then making any changes to the poster and 6 months later importing the final poster content into the brochure. And the cycle continues.
Would XML handle well? The little I've read so far about XML and tables indicates that each cell would need to be tagged. This could easily result in mis-tagging a cell which would screw up the content import, right? I'm talking about hundreds (thousands?) of cells.
And since the structure of the table would be changing due to adding/removing rows/columns, it seems I would need to tag each cell of the tables every time I wanted to import content.
Am I understanding all this correctly?
Thanks for your input.

Hi
You are right each cell nee to be tagged in XML tables, if you are working with more than hundreds/thousands of cells, be careful in content tagging. adding/removing columns/rows would really affect the structure of the XML and if it need to extract/export the content the structure of XML will not be correct. It is better to avoid XML tables in case of adding/removing columns/rows.

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