Have you ever wished that you could insert a table into one of your hubs?  Now, you can.

This week, HubPages has added the Table Capsule to its set of hubtool components.  This capsule allows you create a table from scratch or to create a table from a Csv file.  This means that you can build a table from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

There are three ways to create tables using the new Table Capsule.

In today’s blog, I will show how to create a table from scratch and how to import it from Microsoft Excel.

Creating a Table From Scratch

When you first add a table to your hub, you will see an empty table with three columns and four rows.

Once you click the edit the button, you will see three drop-down menus:

• -insert/delete column/row-
• -center, right, or left-
• -bold or unbold-

These are the actions that can be performed on the table.  To do an action, you select a table’s cell, select the action that you want from a drop-down menu, and then hit the “update” button.  When you select a table’s cell, the cell is highlighted in orange.

In the screen shot below, I have selected the header cell for the third column:

You will notice that the cells in the last column and in the last row are grayed out.  The purpose here is to make it easy to add columns or rows.  If you select any cell in the last column, as soon as you start typing, the entire column turns white and is available for editing.  A new gray column is added at the end.  The gray rows works in the same way.

If you want to insert a column before a current column, you would do the following:

• select the column (its borders turn orange)
• select the “insert column before” from the drop-down menu
• hit the “update” button.

After you type an entry into a cell, you can hit hit the TAB key to move to the next cell or the SHIFT+TAB to move back.  You can also use the DOWN arrow to move to the next cell below or use the UP arrow to move back.

In this way, you can insert columns or rows, delete columns or rows, and clear out columns or rows.  You can also choose make text bold.  The default is to make headers bold.  You can also choose whether text should be shifted right, shifted left, or centered.  The default is for all text to be centered.

Creating a table from Microsoft Excel

To create a table from Excel, the first step is to export the table as a CSV file.  This is done by clicking the down arrow of the “Save as type” when you save the file.  Then, just make sure to pick CSV format.

Once the CSV file is saved, hit the edit button for the table and select the radio button that says “My Computer”.  You will then be able to upload the CSV file as shown below:

When you are done, you will have the following:

Then hit save and you are done.

In the coming weeks, we will be adding additional features to the table capsule including additional table styles and the ability to sort columns.

If you have ideas or suggestions for making the table capsule better, please let us know.