Suggestions to managing tables in content

[mscore]

With all the past PW projects I have refrained from giving users the TinyMC html-editor and stuck to Markdown. This has proved to be a great decision.

Most practical problems with past CMS:s has been with content formatting, users not knowing how or messing styles. Not giving them that possibility is just great.

However, now I am looking at a project with tables (prices and specs). Anyone have wisdom to share here? Best way to allow users to create tables in their content without generating support request for table formatting, Office-copy-pas messes etc?

Thanks!

[diogo]

Textile has support for tables http://txstyle.org/doc/15/tables but copy/pasting from excel is not an option here.

Doesn't seem too difficult to create a text formatter for this, since when you copy/paste from excel you get tabular data like this:

ewrwer	ewe	werew	werew
werewr	werwer	werwer	ewrewr
ewrewr	werq	wqeqe	qweqwe

[adrian]

I handle this exact scenario with a combination a PageTableExtended for block content control and make one of those blocks have a FieldtypeJson field. This may not be for the average user since it initially requires pasting in CSV data, but once in, it is a nicely editable table and really easy for you to output  formatted table exactly how you want. If your users are already trained up with Markdown then it may not be too much of a stretch.

[mscore]

Thanks for the ideas!