Posting a Table as content

tamhas - February 3, 2009 - 17:16

We have a two column Excel spreadsheet that we would like to post as content, not as an attachment, but as something directly readable. In the past, we have exported the sheet to HTML and posted that as a part of a non-Drupal website just fine, but when we post the HTML in the content of a Book Page, it displays more as a list than a table, even when using Full HTML. Is there a solution here?

Using Drupal 6.9 with the Giordani sub-theme of the Marinelli theme.

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WorldFallz - February 3, 2009 - 18:30

You might want to look at the http://drupal.org/project/tablemanager module.

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Except that we are running

tamhas - February 3, 2009 - 19:05

Except that we are running 6.9 and the latest version of tablemanager is 5.x and it appears to have gotten no updates in quite a while.

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WorldFallz - February 3, 2009 - 19:18

The d6 dev version seems to work well and there's an issue in the issues queue with updates even today-- the maintainer is definitely still active and working on it. but obviously, the choice is yours.

Didn't notice the dev

tamhas - February 3, 2009 - 22:56

Didn't notice the dev release ... I'm a bit shy about those, but it could be worth a try.

Tablemanager does the trick

tamhas - February 5, 2009 - 19:52

We tried implementing the Tablemanager module and once we got past the usual setup mysteries it works an absolute treat on loading CSV files to make the table and then being able to reference them in a content page. Easy Peasy and nice looking.

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WorldFallz - February 5, 2009 - 20:01

Excellent.

Can you post an excerpt of

Barrett - February 3, 2009 - 19:17

Can you post an excerpt of the table html you're pasting into the book page?

I'll see what I can come up

tamhas - February 3, 2009 - 22:59

I'll see what I can come up with ... I'm not the one trying to do the actual posting. The contents are similar to this http://www.reviewsbytdev.com/2007Summary which is just trying to use ..... to space the numbers, obviously without a lot of success. The HTML is straight from what Excel puts out, so it is possible it has a lot of unnecessary junk in it that is complicating things.

OK, here are a couple of

tamhas - February 4, 2009 - 02:30

OK, here are a couple of examples of what she is getting by posting the HTML that comes from Excel

Test of Excel spreadsheet.htm posted as filtered html
http://www.reviewsbytdev.com/Test1htm

Test of Excel spreadsheet.htm posted as full html
http://www.reviewsbytdev.com/Test2htm

Looking at the actual HTML, I am pretty sure that the problem is that there is **way** too much specificity in the HTML ... Excel doing its best to reproduce *exactly* what one would have seen printing from Excel. Is there some kind of "dumb down" filter for HTML that would remove most of this?

I tried editing it in Dreamweaver, but it is pretty painful since there is so much markup.

Table Manager, on first glance, looks like a solution that would be fine for building a table from scratch, but not so useful here where the tables exist and have hundreds and hundreds of rows.

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WorldFallz - February 4, 2009 - 12:32

This is a notorious pia-- the cruft that ms includes in their "html" is almost always to blame. There are some pay programs that attempt to sanitize ms office html, but I've been having pretty good luck with the 'paste from word' button available in fckeditor. I'm not sure how it will work with an excel spreadsheet though. Might be worthwhile trying to convert it to a word table, saving the file as "filtered html" (what a joke, but it is somewhat cleaner), then pasting that into a page with the 'paste from word' button from one of the wysiwyg editors.