HTML TableTool

This small HyperCard stack quickly converts data from spreadsheets or databases saved as standard tab-delimited text files to HTML-tagged files that produces beautiful tables with the net browser Netscape 1.1N.
It's a good idea to study the files ³Tables in Netscape 1.1² and ³The Table Sampler², that can be downloaded from Netscape Communications, before using HTML TableTool.
The stack supports the most important tags. For more complex tables, you might also need COLSPAN and ROWSPAN. For examples, please refer to the documents mentioned above.
HTML TableTool should be pretty self-explanatory, experiment with the sample file ³TestData.txt² until you get the result shown below:

Country Language Capital Currency
Sweden Svenska Stockholm Krona/Öre
Denmark Dansk Køpenhavn Krone/Øre

If your tables don't come out as expected, there is probably something wrong with the source files. When the data is part of a larger spreadsheet, copy it to a clean sheet and save it as ASCII text. Be careful with formatting, selecting a whole row and setting it to bold, for example, will cause ClarisWorks to save the whole row, not only the cells with data. If you erase some data at the end of the table with the Delete key, ClarisWorks will still export the empty cells, use Clear in the Edit menu instead.
Databases can be tricky, it is not necessarily obvious which fields that are exported. You can always open the text file as a spreadsheet and edit it there.

Normally, the HTML editor of your preference, takes care of tagging special characters with ASCII numbers over 126. If you live in ASCII world, you can leave the NonASCII check box in HTML TableTool off and save some time. Those of you, who like me, needs characters such as åäö, will appreciate that HTML TableTool can convert these to å, and so forth. If you do, you must also take a good look at Niklas Frykholms HTML Pro. In this nice program you type the clear text in one window and gets the tagged result in a second window. This is, by the way, how I got hold of the tags, thank you Niklas!

If you find any problems with or have suggestions for HTML TableTool, please don't hesitate to contact me at the address below.


Bertil Holmberg, Malmoe University Hospital, SWEDEN

Version 1.0 6/14/95