Importing Tables

[Pat4]

I import a lot of tables into RH7 from either Word or Excel. The tables import from word very nicely, but I am having trouble with Excel. I start by selecting the cells I want on my worksheet and saving them as web page. When I import the page into RoboHelp I have a lot of trouble with table and cell borders. I tried following the advice from the message string "Use of tables and style sheet" on this forum with mixed results. Using the prcedures outlined on Peter Grainge's web site i was able to come close.

My table is four columns by 200+ rows. I was able to get all of the borders working except for the top border on the first two cells and the entire bottome border.

Any ideas that might help?

Thanks

[Peter Grainge]

My guess is that is down to the way Microsoft writes the HTML in the web page. You need to make sure there is absolutely no inline styling applied to the table and that the webpage does not have an embedded style sheet. Look near the top of the page in the code for embedded styles.

[MergeThis]

You might try performing a major cleanup on one of these beasties in Word as a test, because the problems might reflect when and how the table has been created, then edited over and over, possibly by multiple inexperienced users.

I would copy a table into a New, blank Word doc, named with a test file name you'll need later for importing to RH:

1. In the table, select merged cells and select Table > Split Cells to eliminate them.
2. Select Table > Convert > Table to Text.
3. Select the entire table and click Ctrl+spacebar (to remove all styles).
4. Select all content and reverse step 2 (Table > Convert > Text to Table).
5. Format the table afresh (don't merge any cells in Word - save that for RH after the import).
6. Save the Word file.
7. In RH, import the file, assign styles, and merge cells where needed.


Good luck,
Leon

[Pat4]

MergeThis, good advice, I will give it a try.

Thanks

[Pat4]

Thanks, I do look at your web site fairly frequently and it is usually very helpful.

[Peter Grainge]

Pat

I have an uncomfortable feeling you misread me. I meant look in the top of the page as in top of the HTML for your topic.

[Pat4]

No, I understood what you meant. I am using the code from your website and it is working very well. Follow-up question: Is it possible to set otjher parameters in the CSS? I would like to be able to set the table size (width) and column width.

Thanks.

Lesson learned: It seems that when you save an Excel file as HTML Excel includes a lot of baggage that doesn't work well in RoboHelp. I found that copying the portion of the spreadsheet I needed to Word and importing it into RoboHelp works much better.

Follow up question