Insert excel table into wordpress hosting

Posted by Bhagwad Park on Feb 9, 2016 | No Comments

WordPress doesn’t have any default functionality to add tables. So what happens if you own a site that needs to use them regularly? Moreover, there is a lot of functionality you can add to a table in order to make it useful to a visitor. Providing the ability to sort on various columns dramatically improves the usability and readability of any table with more than just a few rows of information. In the same way, letting the user page through multiple layers of data via JavaScript so that they don’t have to reload the whole page can be a welcome addition depending on the purpose of the table.

Of course, if you just need to use a table for a one off post on your blog, you might be better off manually constructing the HTML yourself. But if you want something a little more, you should use the definitive plug-in for WordPress tables – TablePress .

Creating Tables via TablePress

Unlike what you might think, you can’t add tables via this plug-in using the normal WordPress editor. Rather, you need to create the tables beforehand and configure them. Actual table display is accomplished via a short code. One benefit of this approach is that it allows you to reuse the same table several times without unnecessarily duplicating data. So start off by selecting “Add New Table” from the TablePress menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard.

Here is where you will initially specify the name and description of the table as well as the tentative number of rows and columns. Don’t worry – the following screen where you actually enter the data will allow you to add rows and columns if you want.

In the next step, we need to manually enter the data in the table. However, TablePress also allows you to import information from external sources such as Excel and CSV files. To do this, head over to the “Import” tab, select the file and the format to import.

If you want to enter the information manually, you’ll be presented with the opportunity to do so immediately after you’ve added a new table. You can see below that I’ve created dummy table content to start off with:

After entering the data, you can choose various options for display. For example, you might want to retain the first row as the “table header”. You can decide whether or not you want rows to alternate in color. All of these optional but helpful features allow your table to stand out from a wall of text. You can also use the field “Extra CSS Classes” to assign the table a custom CSS class that you style separately.

Further down, are the JavaScript features. These provide interesting additions to your table so that users can more easily make sense of the information provided to them. Here you can enable sorting, pagination, and horizontal scrolling. You can even include a search box in real time that filters the table as text is entered. Extremely useful for tables with a lot of content!

Adding Tables via Shortcode

Once you’ve created and configured your table, head over to the post where you want to insert it. In the visual editor, locate the TablePress icon shown here:

This will bring up a list of all the tables you’ve created so far. Find the one you want and hit “Insert Shortcode” on the right-hand side as shown below:

This will output the necessary code to display the table when it is finally rendered. Note that you won’t be able to see it within the visual editor itself. Here’s how it looks when a user visits your website:

TablePress is a classy WordPress plug-in that does one job really well. Whether or not you want to install it for a single table on your website is up to you. A simple HTML table simply won’t be able to match the impact and usefulness of one created with this add-on.

Enter its URL below to find out now:

About the Author

Bhagwad Park is a technical writer from India and currently resides in Florida. He takes a keen interest in the IT world, the cloud, and also maintains a blog focusing on human rights in the developing world.

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