View this PageEdit this PageUploads to this PageVersions of this PageHomeRecent ChangesSearchHelp Guide

Excel based Swiki Table Editor

I have been using the Swiki for some time. I like it for its ease of administration and portability. In my use of the Swiki I have on occasion needed to create some really large tables. While the existing Swiki mechanism for creating tables is great from most things, if the tables need to get large editing them by hand can get really tedious quickly.

To help with this issue I have created an Excel based Swiki table editor. I used Excel because I had it and with a little VBA code I was able to create a fairly powerful little editor for maintaining those larger tables. I am uploading a copy to this page for the benefit of anyone else who needs such a tool.

Since this tool uses VBA on top of standard Excel, you will need to enable macros when opening the tool to use it. If you want to safely examine the code first to insure that it is not doing anything nefarious, simply disable the macros when opening the tool and use the VBA editor to check it out. I have signed the VBA project with a certificate so if you want to avoid being prompted about the macros every time simply install the certificate used to sign the project or replace it with one of your own.

Hope you find it useful!

William F. Mielke

Swiki Table Editor:

The Swiki table editor is a simple tool based on Microsoft Excel which can be used to facilitate the editing of large tables. The tool supports the following properties:

Property
Features Supported
Text FontFont Size, Font Face
Text StylesBold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough
Text ColorFull color support for font foreground colors.
Horizontal AlignmentPer cell: Left, Center, Right
Cell ContentsLine breaks automatically converted to <br> tags

Download: SwikiTableEditor.xls

Instructions:
  1. Download and open the SwikiTableEditor.xls tool. The tool contains macros which are required for proper operation, so if you are prompted you will need to enable them.
  2. When the spreadsheet opens a form will pop up automatically. If you close this form you can bring it back up by typing ctl-t.
  3. Edit the Swiki page which contains the table that you wish to modify and select the text of the table to be edited. Note that if the table was previously edited using this tool and there is a <div> tag around the table to set the default font you should select that as well.
  4. Drag the selected table and drop it into the text box on the Swiki editor form.
  5. Hit the To Active Excel Sheet button to parse the Swiki table and to copy the text to the cells of the active sheet.
  6. If desired, hit the Autofit Active Excel Sheet buttons to adjust the width of the pasted columns.
  7. Close the Swiki table editor form.
  8. Use the standard Excel tools to edit the text of the table, as desired.
  9. Bring the Swiki table editor form back up by typing ctl-t.
  10. Select the font related features that you wish to have included in the table update.
  11. Hit the From Active Excel Sheet button or the From Selection button to recreate the text in the Swiki table editor form, as needed.
  12. Drag the full text from the Swiki table editor form to the Swiki page and drop it in the appropriate location.

Link to this Page

  • Enhancements last edited on 7 March 2007 at 3:31 pm by 135.244.1.143