Microsoft Office Live Small Business Community

Using tables makes organizing and laying out a web page very easy and I would like to see a little more flexibilty with them such as:

1. When inserting rows or columns, having the option to insert to the left or right of the cursor for a column, and insert above or below the cursor for a row.

2. Also related to inserting, if you hightlight more than 1 row or colum, then insert that amount of rows or column instead of 1 at a time.

3. The ablility to delete the entire contents of a table without deleteing the table or to delete the selected cell's contents. If you hightlight more then 1 row or column the delete key doesn't work.

It would also be nice if you could set the column widths, currently you can have two columns with just text and they don't end up of equal size. When you want one column to be narrow and another wider you have to add a bunch of spaces to stretch one and shrink the other.

The ability to have transparent row and column lines would be really nice too, could make the expandable rounded corner tables using images in the corners again (could do this in the past, but not anymore)

Hi SJR,

I agree with your suggestions also, good thoughts. Tables play such an important role in web design and I think more effort should be focused on this topic.

I would also line the ability to remove the inside cell borders but leave to overall outside border on. Right now to get that effect I have to insert a table inside another table.

founder:

I would also line the ability to remove the inside cell borders but leave to overall outside border on. Right now to get that effect I have to insert a table inside another table.

Yes, that is what used to happen when I set the outer border to 0 px, you still had an outer border that could match the page background, and the inner cell lines didn't show.

The feature to use an image as a table background is really good, but you can't have columns and rows in the table or they show up against the image.  If I make a rounded cornered image to use for some content, I'm stuck with a single cell table or again, the lines show.  Using a table inside the first works if you are using a solid colored image but not if the image has variation in the color.

It would also be nice to have completely transparent table borders and cell lines if you wanted to use an image as the background for the content area.  Then you could do that and also arrange the content in tables. 

Maybe if we wish really hard the powers that be will grant our wishes.....

Silly me, you are right about the borders.

Well, I am wishing, let's see if it comes true. :)

For what it's worth, you can set the column width in HTML by adding "width=X" after each TD tag. It's kind of a pain, but if you start with a basic one-row table, set the column widths, and then just add more rows, it'll do the trick.

Regards,

Kris