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Best way to make a table?

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Ken Evans
10 years ago · Last reply by Andrew Misplon 10 years ago

One of my pages contains a table with column headings such as Year, Event, Notes…
To make the table I used the “Table” in Visual Editor.
But I’m finding is very hard to populate and edit the table.
– I can’t click & drag the column & row boundaries.
– edits in one cell seem to “spill” into an adjacent cell.
etc.

Is this the only way to make a table?
Or are there better ways?
Thanks
Ken

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Replies

19
  1. Daniel Staff 10 years, 10 months ago

    Hi Ken

    Give this a plugin a try https://wordpress.org/plugins/tablepress/ it is the best way to create a tables in wordpress

    Let me know if that works out for you

    Cheers

  2. Ken Evans 10 years, 10 months ago

    Yes – I had tried tablepress (After a lot of web floundering and trial and error).
    It looks to be very capable but there is a steep learning curve – like a lot of this stuff!

    Some of the reviewers say that it slows page response time down – one reviewer mentioned a 7 second page load time. What’s your view on this aspect?

  3. Ken Evans 10 years, 10 months ago

    I installed tablepress on a test server on my western digital NAS box.
    Now, when I try to access wordpress on the server I get a 404 error.
    When I Googled “tablepress 404 error” I found lots and lots of hits.
    The developer just says “I don’t know” and offers no solutions.

    The 404 Detailed Error Information says:
    Module IIS Web Core
    Notification MapRequestHandler
    Handler StaticFile
    Error Code 0x80070002

    This is unlikely to be your problem but since you recommended tablepress, I thought that you and others ought to know about this.
    Makes me think about going back to asp.net/sql server!

  4. Ken Evans 10 years, 10 months ago

    The quick fix I’m using is to make the tables in Word 2010 and then paste them into a Visual Editor widget.

  5. Ken Evans 10 years, 9 months ago

    Tablepress & 404 error
    I withdraw my earlier comments – the 404 error was caused by something else.
    So I will now continue with my experiments with tablepress
    Sorry for my too-quick reaction.

  6. Andrew Misplon Staff 10 years, 9 months ago

    Hi Ken

    Really glad to hear you made progress here. Thanks for keeping us updated. Hope you can make progress with TablePress. I’ve seen it used on many client sites before so hopefully it’s the one.

  7. Ken Evans 10 years, 9 months ago

    Well – I have now made quite a few experiments – and I am not at all impressed.
    Maybe it is just my ignorance at work but this is what I have learned so far.

    Having to write custom CSS to change the width of a table is bad enough, but then you have to guess the right pixel width by trial and error. And the whole control panel is – well – juvenile – huge buttons and limited functionality.

    It may look good to an inexperienced person but I have been using ASP.NET for years and lots of other stuff before that. Tablepress feels like I’m back in the 1970’s having to write assembler or PL/1 code to change each little thing.
    The help is equally hard to navigate.

  8. Andrew Misplon Staff 10 years, 9 months ago

    How big are your tables? This is how a table looks in HTML:

    <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
	<tr>
		<td>Cell one</td>
		<td>Cell two</td>
		<td>Cell three</td>
	</tr>
</table>

    For simple tables, you could consider writing the HTML yourself. Above is single row (tr) table with three cells (td). The theme’s stylesheet should handle the rest. That would be inserted into the Text tab or the Text tab of the Visual Editor widget or into a Text widget.

  9. Ken Evans Private 10 years, 9 months ago

    This is a private message.

  10. Andrew Misplon Staff 10 years, 9 months ago

    Hi Ken

    I unfortunately didn’t receive any login info on our other thread. If possible, please re-send to [email protected] and we’ll take a look at the menu drop down issue.

  11. Andrew Misplon Staff 10 years, 9 months ago

    …and the table issue.

  12. Ken Evans 10 years, 9 months ago

    Hi Andrew,

    Did you get the server logon information?

  13. Andrew Misplon Staff 10 years, 9 months ago

    Unfortunately not yet, I’ll check our email in a little bit. Hopefully there is just a server delay.

  14. Ken Evans 10 years, 9 months ago

    OK,

    I deleted the original account and setup a new user.

  15. Andrew Misplon Staff 10 years, 9 months ago

    Thanks for the feedback.

    Menu
    I’m unfortunately not seeing this problem. Your drop down menu item, References is showing four items. Your menu is correctly saved to the theme’s primary menu location with four drop down under References.

    Perhaps let us the situation where this is happening.

    Tables
    If the plugin route isn’t working there is a really good table question and reply here:
    https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/is-there-an-obviouseasy-way-to-use-tables-in-blog-posts

    Links listed at that forum reply cover the manual table creation steps I advised but with more detail.

    TablePress might have caused site problems due to lack of memory. That’s one possible reason. Increasing the PHP memory available to your WordPress installation could be one route to go if you’d like to re-look at that plugin.

    Surveys
    One route to go is to use an external service like: https://www.surveymonkey.com/.

    Alternatively you could investigate the plugin route: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=poll

  16. Ken Evans 10 years, 9 months ago

    Hi Andrew,

    Thanks for that.

    Remember |I’m a real WP newbie so please could you give me a bit of guidance on how to “jazz up” the site?
    e.g. I don’t know how to change the colours on the masthead & footer or what colours would work best.
    What is your opinion of the layout and structure (I know that I still have a lot to do)

    How would you make it look good?

  17. Ken Evans 10 years, 9 months ago

    Hi Andrew,

    Good news on the table front.

    I found that I had a copy of Microsoft Expression Web 4 on my machine (installed years ago).

    It has a wonderful HTML table generator & editor.

  18. Andrew Misplon Staff 10 years, 9 months ago

    Super, thanks for sharing that tip with everyone.

  19. Andrew Misplon Staff 10 years, 9 months ago

    Regarding colors. You’ll find color controls at Appearance > Customize > Theme Design. Totally up to you but it can be easiest to stick to one accent color. So for example, if your menu hover color is blue, make your social icons in the header blue and make your link color blue, using whites and dark gray to take care of the rest.

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