Not the best way, but my fastest reponse -

Type ? before the text

Open find change

Find = ?

Change = ^t

Find/Change may ignore tables, if so, select the text and limit the find to "Selected"

Edit - Type > Insert Special Character > Other > Tab

http://indesignsecrets.com/typing-tab-in-a-table-cell.php

Message was edited by: Daniel Flavin

Option-tab inserts a tab into a table without moving to the next cell. (My bad on the original post. It's option-tab, not shift-tab.)

I can guarantee that it isn't a custom shortcut; it just seems to be undocumented in the default set. If you go to Keyboard Shortcuts, pick any command and type option-tab in the New Shortcut field, it'll tell you that that combination is unassigned.

But it does work to insert a tab into a cell without moving your cursor to the next cell. It's worked for as many versions back as I can remember, and I think I started with InDesign back before the first CS release.

I wonder why it isn't documented, though, when it does work. One could stop it from working by assigning that key combination to another command. I just tried it, and it looks like the New Shortcut does override the default behavior.

Maybe that's why it's undocumented, that it isn't the same or doesn't work on both platforms. Switching between apps is command-tab for us Mac users. Hey, try command-tab in a cell on the Windows side and see if it does anything.... If that doesn't work, I'd test some other modifiers with a tab and see if anything else works.

Alt(option)-tab has always worked and still works in tables. Standard short-cut.

Yeesh, listening to y'all single-platform folks is excruciating. Macs basically have a whole extra modifier key, so there is no one-to-one mapping of modifier keys from platform to platform. Saying "option on Mac is alt on Windows" is inaccurate. Maybe in Parallels this is true, I can't recall off the top of my head and I only have archaic Macs here at work.  But, in general, you need to actually compute regularly on both platforms in order to actually know what is going on here.

Macs have command (ye olde open-apple), option, and control. Option usually has "alt" printed on it on keyboards manufactured by Apple but it does not mean that all cross-platform apps will remap option-key combos to alt-key combos. Windows PCs have control and alt. The Windows/start key is another modifier key but only does OS-related stuff, I've never seen any application use it to do anything. (On top of that, I think that some non-English localizations of Windows actually still use the functionality of the AltGr key. Other operating systems have - of course! - other sets of conventions for modifier keys.)

Lastly: I looked at the keyboard shortcut on Windows default installation of CS5, and in the "Tables" context the Type menu -> Insert Special Character: Other: was blank.

There is no default "insert tab in context of tables" shortcut. Scarily, Windows Indy CS5 will let you define control + tab here, and claim it's "unassigned" (because ID doesn't inform you "this is reserved by your OS to switch between active windows/tabs in apps that respect the OS conventions for subwindows/tabs/etc"). But you lose active-subwindow-switching functionality if you assign it to insert Special Character: Other: Tab.

No apologies necessary, Peter - I neglected to add the obvious picture that would indicate that my use of "excruciating" was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. Besides, it wasn't you that wasn't getting the absence of one-to-one mapping.

That being said, I'm aware of more than a few applications (mostly games, honestly) that run into cross-platform-unification-of-key-combo problems because one platform allows freedom to developers to make choices, while the other platform(s) restrict developers to greater or lesser degrees with their UI guidelines & APIs and suchlike. And, honestly, this happens to me all the time:

Use Windows app a lot

Get used to key combos (hooray muscle memory)

Install Mac version

Get confused when key combo doesn't match Windows perfectly

Randomly try similar combos + Option

Find one that works

Get confused every single time I switch back to Windows, where that dang Windows key is in the same physical location as the Option key on my Mac. No, I didn't want the Start key to pop up.

Fortunately, InDesign's keyboard prefs are so robust that I never run into problems unless I'm trying to use someone else's install.