Jaa

Wiki Life: Using Tables in your Articles

  • Artikkeli

One of the most often used features of the Wiki is the ability to create tables.  There are many different ways to do it, some easier than others depending on the experience of the person creating the table.  I'll go through a few different options available on the TechNet Wiki.

Insert Table

Once you click on the Edit tab of an article, you are presented with a radEditor rich text box where you can type or copy/paste your article in a WYSIWYG format.  In the toolbar just above the text box is an icon that looks like a spreadsheet with a pen on top of it called 'Insert Table'.  Clicking on this button allows you to select a number of rows and columns using a visual aide.  This will insert a basic table with no formatting.

Data Entry

Now that you have a table with the desired number of text areas, it is time to enter some data.  If you have a small amount of data, you can enter the data manually, cell by cell.  One caveat to this is that the editor automatically adds a space in each cell, so you might want to remove that extra space if you have a lot of columns to save space.  If you already have a large amount of data in a spreadsheet or other format in table form, you can copy/paste it into the editor.  However, depending on the source, this can carry over formatting, which might not translate well to the Wiki editor formatting.

Formatting

If you save the article and take a look at it, you might notice that it doesn't look exactly how you want.  Do not fret!  You can either edit the table by right-clicking on it and using the GUI or edit the HTML manually.  The GUI is rather self-explanatory, so I will go into the HTML editing.  One of the most-used properties of tables that makes reading the information easier is borders.  To add in a very simple border to create a barrier around your data, you can replace the HTML <table> tag with <table border="1">.  If you would prefer a sleaker table border, here is another optional table tag: <table style="border: thin solid #000000; border-image: initial;" rules="all" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">.

If the table that you created is too wide, it can be cut off on the right side.  To get around this, you can manually modify the width of the table using the appropriately named 'width' property.  Example: <table border="1" width="600">. 

Do you have a tip or trick to creating Wiki articles?  Leave a comment below and once there are a few, I'm sure some enterprising Wiki Ninja will create an article out of them.

-Rich Prescott

Engineering Efficiency
@Rich_Prescott
Windows System Administration tool
AD User Creation tool

Comments