tabs in table cells, eh wot?

[Ken Poshedly]

Group,

I've check the FrameMaker help feature, Googled for it, and poked all over the Reference page and paragraph formatting menus for this one, but with no luck so far.

The parts book I'm working on includes nearly 150 lists (tables), all formatted the same, with the line art graphic on the left page and the parts list opposite it on the right facing page. Each parts list table consists of four columns labeled Item No., Part No., Description and Qty. (Standard stuff, eh?)

For appearance sake, we choose to turn off all of the table ruling lines and use a light grey (10 percent black) shading for the table header row. 

Because some of the text descriptions in the Description column are very short, I'd like to have a dot leader follow the wording in each description cell so it looks like this:

Item No.   Part No.               Description                               Qty

1             3245676          Assembly, main platform . . . . . . . . . 2

(The spacing may not be quite right in this example, but surely, you get the idea.)

So the question is whether or not a following tab can automatically follow the text in each cell of the Description column.

Apparently, it must be added manually (according to the Format > Paragraphs > Paragraph Designer > tab stops feature).

I was hoping that there would be something on the Reference page that could be adapted, but apparently not.

-- Kenpo in Atlanta