Ask An Ambassador - Using Tables in Blog Posts
If you've ever wanted to use a table within your ActiveRain blog, then this is the post for you to bookmark and study thanks to Dick Greenberg :
I like using tables. When properly designed, they're an effective way to present certain kinds of information. But you don't see a lot of tables in blog posts, and there's a good reason for that - they're really hard to get right. If you're an HTML master, you can probably do it with only minimal mumbling to yourself, but for the rest of us, it can be a daunting challenge.
Several years ago, I discovered a reasonable workaround*, using Excel and ScribeFire, that makes it a lot easier to include something like this in your posts:
Address: Style: Sq.Ft. Bedrooms: Price: Active: 1310 Crabapple Ranch 3267 3 $410,000 5293 Apricot Ranch 3600 4 $480,000 1149 Coral Burst Ranch 4764 5 $650,000 Pending: 5253 Fallgold Ranch 4310 4 $549,900 Sold: 5035 Apricot Ranch 3248 5 $386,165 5250 Apricot Ranch 3324 3 $390,000 5225 Apricot Ranch 3484 3 $395,777 5235 Apricot Ranch 3588 3 $400,000 1270 Crabapple Ranch 3416 3 $410,000 1319 Crabapple Ranch 3484 3 $410,779 5233 Apricot Ranch 3484 5 $430,000 5255 Apricot Ranch 3763 4 $431,750 5135 Apricot Ranch 3452 5 $437,300 5215 Crabapple Ranch 3400 4 $450,153 5285 Apricot Ranch 3603 4 $477,360 1106 Coral Burst Ranch 4400 3 $530,500 5118 Apricot Ranch 4456 5 $565,000 5275 Fallgold Ranch 5018 4 $581,481 1115 Coral Burst Ranch 5266 4 $610,000
I've wanted to share how to do this, but trying to write it all out with screencaps doesn't work particularly well - it's long and complicated that way, and you wouldn't read it unless you were really, really desperate to do a table. And then it occurred to me - why don't I just show you. I've always wanted to do one of those screencast videos, so I reached out to our resident tech expert, Craig Daniels who turned me on to Screencast-o-matic, a free program for creating video tutorials. It works great and is really easy to use
So here's my tutorial for including a nice looking table in your blog posts (easier to see what's going on in full-screen):
Note: You're going to need ScribeFire, a great formatting add-on for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and whatever passes for IE these days. You should already be using it, but if you're not, here's a link to a post I wrote about it not long ago.
*If there's a super easy other way to do tables besides just saying to hell with it and using a jpeg, and I've been going through all this unnecessarily for so long, please don't tell me - I don't want to know.
Mary & Dick Greenberg
New Paradigm Partners LLC
2601 S. Lemay Ave. #41
Fort Collins, CO 80525
970-689-4663
www.maryanddick.com
Data Source: IRES MLS
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