I miss having a table editor

I would love it if Pinegrow had a genuine table editor. The best HTML table editor I have ever used is in Microsoft Expression Web, which was much better than the table editor in Adobe Dreamweaver.

Hi, if you still have it in installed , could you just create your tables in it and then copy the code out?
Paste it into PG, if you do a lot of Table work? as in representing data, not lay out?

I just had a look around and I think V4 of that app is still available for free.

I actually did use Expression Web to create a very large table (8 columns and 45 rows) yesterday. Then I copied the code and pasted it into Pinegrow. Because of frequent crashing in Windows 10, Expression Web has become too unreliable. I also have Adobe Dreamweaver that can edit tables, but (for me) almost everything about Dreamweaver seems unintuitive. Pinegrow feels much more natural to me than Dreamweaver.

Ok and just checking…ummm…your not…using Tables
For LAYOUT? are you?
as in old school stuff?

I wont say/suggest anything else, just incase you are in the process of creating a very funky
Periodic Table or something (and have found a lot of new elements :slight_smile: )

MMMM, you got me thinking now.
Since your Doing website stuff and therefore using HTML, CSS and SHOULD know Javascript (I don’t :frowning: )

how about MAKING/ROLLING YOUR OWN APP to do this very task with Javascript or such like?
I know. in true Forum -

ask question, get asked WHY ARE YOU DOING IT THIS WAY -instead of an answer sort of style.
But you did start me thinking.

so how about THIS>?

https://www.tablesgenerator.com/html_tables

or then checking out the code it yourself sort of thing like these

just wondering if they would be of interest or any use.
Or… you could ask the PG Devs for a table creating tool too :slight_smile:
or do both.
or neither… or something
else…

As a matter of fact, I AM using the table environment :grinning:

I’m not using it for the page layout. I’m using it to include a large table in the document whose rows and columns must NOT reflow. In this case, the priority is on the tabular relationship of the data rather than usability on tiny screens. I’m a university professor, and what I use the table for is to list the lecture dates, topics, assigned homework problems, and due dates for the whole semester in one big table. Occasionally, the original schedule isn’t perfect and I might need to shift portions of one or two columns up or down by a row or two. I could do this by creating a PDF file from a spreadsheet, but it is more convenient for my students to bookmark the schedule page and then go there without the extra step of loading a PDF file. Also, saving an MS Excel spreadsheet in HTML format produces such awful code that I have to run it through a website like https://htmltidy.net/ to clean up the code. The most convenient option would be to edit the table directly in the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) portion of my HTML editor.

Phew! and relax! My inner Table Layout Demon can sleep well tonight.

Mmm, did you look at that first link?

https://www.tablesgenerator.com/html_tables

it says you can copy and paste tables into it and it gives you a HTML talble… how hideous is the code that that spits out for one of your tables, if you don’t mind me asking?
I will check out your suggestion via your other link too.
I have no tables here at the mo!

Finished uni some time ago…and my time management has successfully sucked ever since.
Maybe I should do something about that, this new year.

Cheers for that link. I might well play with that now and in the future.
BookMarked.
:slight_smile:

Here’s the page with my schedule in the form of a large table:

https://math.byu.edu/cardon/math290/Schedule.html

If there is a better way to present this information than with a table, I’m open to suggestions. It needs to be easy to modify the table from time to time by moving portions of columns up or down.

intriguing.
I shall have a look.

As a former Uni student who also has some specific learning disorders with regards symbols, interfaces, dates times and numbers, that layout gives me kittens!

I would probably have turned up every 34rd, maybe 2nd lesson, with a possibility of having also missed odd date days :).

I shall play with this now

And is there a reason why it hasn’t been presented monthly calendar layout fashion, similar to your weekly one?
Some automated process which took your tabular data and presented it on a relevant monthly template could be funky (differing day values in months etc)

Well, having had a little look and thought on your query, I would be inclined to go along with this approach.
It will look nicer for the students, be easier to instantly visualise and …will…look like a calendar! :slight_smile: so you too can hang it on our wall AND… add your other events to it etc.

It will also save you faffing about , importing data and presenting it from an Excel spreadsheet into a HTML format.

but… may have to distribute it as a PDF… or some other format.
here you go.

check out this link.

https://www.excelforum.com/excel-general/846267-auto-populate-calendar-from-table-excel.html

I think THAT may be a better approach. or
failing that, since your in a maths department, I assume you will have some budding Excel Baby gurus on your course so , ask them! :slight_smile:
how would THEY prefer to have the information presented?
They may well knock up a formulaic converter for you off the cuff.

but yes, This may save you a lot of faffing and actually give you a humanly readable calendar to boot.
I fear I would make errors following your list.

UPDATE.
And then…having pondered it and looking with fresh eyes the next day, I do also see your point of just having a list of dates… in order. I guess they both work, it depends how you digest information. I would have to put them into a calendar format, to get some sort of spacial awareness of when in the month the issue dates and deadlines were, in relation to other days and weeks etc.

But a list form, also works.

This is in fact THE use case for tables. I’m following this - and as well the other “table topic” as well, decided to add a few things here:

This is a quote from the other topic already mentioned:

Why? It is possible to make tables responsive. I created a small example longer time ago which can be found here (click on Table):

https://clients.updog.co/Reginald-TheMagicGrid/index.html

It shows a concept which can be theoretically adapted to your example. It’s fully made in Pinegrow and it’s extremely easy to maintain through Pinegrow outstanding features (such as Focus on). This isolates the pure code portion of the table itself.

Admittedly - I’m not the biggest fan of tables. But I’m a fan of modern and clean solutions. And in my world, the WYSIWYM (WYSIWYG) has long been substituted by VCD (to be read as We See Design) or Visual Constructed Design literally.

Cheers

Thomas

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Yes this has me intrigued now. The format, whilst being initially unintuitive to myself initially is a good use case for a table. I shall check your version on now @Thomas.
But a responsive calender would work too.

Do you have the original xls file available @Alan65, to play around with , or something similar.
You can butcher it if you want to de personalise it, but I am wondering about what format would make a good base to be represented across different formats. Web etc and since Excel can do a huge number of formulaic things that might be an option.

Maybe… or JSON or or … anyone else any ideas too?

such as

and then I went onto 960 grid (remember that?) and its successors , Ie ,

https://unsemantic.com

check out the SE oh middle column (if on a desktop…er somewhere else if on a mobile :smiley: )

ie
" By using push-x and pull-x classes, you can rearrange the visual layout of page, without affecting its source order. While SEO is a bit of a “moving target,” this has been known to help search engines determine the most relevant content on a page.

Typically, code at the top of a page is what search engines tend to focus on the most, and Unsemantic can help to ensure your source code is geared towards that goal."

Not sure how that would work.

And… then there is Magic Grid :wink:

Thomas,

The behavior of your purple colored interactive table would be ideal as a solution to making my huge table interactive and accessible on a small screen. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. Thanks for the suggestion.

Alan

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OK Alan,

having had a bit of fun and started to work on your schedule stuff.
This is how it would look like and feel:

https://clients.updog.co/Reginald-TheMagicGrid/subpages/table.html

To be honest, there’s a couple of more things going on such as a responsive text-concept and the like. This is something, that I built myself and added it to my own framework.

What I cannot judge is how useful this table-approach is - it’s kinda voluntary extra task , literally filling in all data rather than copying stuff over and let an app doing the rest.

Cheers

Thomas

How could a table-editor look like?

Pretty much as the CSS-Grid editor. Just instead of having “area-name” stuff, it should handle native table-cell content. Cell by cell reachable by tab. Just a note to myself and perhaps our brave devs.

FYI, you can make tables in Microsoft Excel and export them as HTML code.

I make most of my schedules with Bootstrap, but occasionally I’ll use a small table here and there.

http://bustosmartialartsofholbrook.com/bustos-martial-arts-holbrook-schedule.html

@Printninja Sure - I am - or better said: I expected this.

The question is: What is quicker? Turning an existing Excel table into the above mentioned “semantic” - or filling an existing and working table with content. The above mentioned table has a data-attribute for each table-head such as:

<td data-th="Lecture Date">Mon, Jan 7</td>

and I guess (it’s just a guess), that those operations cannot be done in Excel?

Cheers

Thomas

I also wish there were a table editor. I have to fall back to Dreamweaver every time I need a table, or just code it directly.

I go far i know, but some newsletter creator functionality would be epic. With some automatic outlook optimization maybe. But this is just a stupid dream.