Depends a lot on the content how well this will work, but really you need to think about the poor search engines (and the visually-disabled folks, too). Try these steps and see what you get:
In Excel, export your table in CSV format. Make careful note of the number of columns in the resulting output.
In Freeway, insert a table on the page, set to [number of columns] wide by 1 or 2 rows. Drag it out to be the size you want. Click into the top-left cell so you see a flashing text cursor. Choose File/Import Text from the main menu, and set the Import picker in the Standard File dialog to Comma-separated. Select your exported file, and press Okay. If all goes well, you should see all of your text flow into the table, one item per cell.
Now the key thing to remember when working this way is that you definitely don’t want to apply any manual styling to any of these table cells. If you do, it will be just that much work again next time you want to edit the content. Instead, create some Tag-only styles in your Styles palette, using the selector td as the Tag and clearing out the default text from the Name field. Any styles you set in this way will apply to any unstyled text found within a TD (table cell) in your page, so the result should be a nice set of tools to format your tabular data.
See, tables are not evil, they’re actually great for tabular data – that’s what they were invented for. It’s only evil to use them to lay out your page, since you’re force-fitting presentation into a semantic structure that actually means something (and layout generally doesn’t mean anything, semantically speaking).
Now if your data changes, follow these steps to painless replacement: double-click into the top left cell, from the main menu choose Item/Table/Insert Row (and specify at top or above). This inserts a blank row above your existing content. Now click once on the first cell at the top left that has data in it (you want to click once only so it is selected, not opened for editing) and then Shift-click on the bottom-right cell that contains content. Press Command-delete to merge all the cells, then press delete again to remove that mega-cell. You should be left with a blank single row, and if you double-click into it, and start over with the import, you should end up with your new set of data.
Walter
On Apr 19, 2012, at 11:10 AM, ejw wrote:
Walter,
I tried the iFrame route and that worked as i wanted in 2 out of 3 browsers…
The reason i want to use a PDF is that i need to present information that is in an Excel spread sheet and converting Excel to a table in FW is not that straight forward as i understand looking at a few threads
Thanks for you continued help.
John
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options