Displaying a table of data in a blog post is no easy task using most common blogging applications today. They tend to have limited table building tools, and properly hand-coding a table in HTML is a fairly daunting task. So, what options are there for bloggers interested in including a table of data in a post?

1. Find a WYSIWYG program that build tables: One that I use fairly often is Writely.com. This is a web based word processor / HTML creator that includes most common word processing tools, such as formatting and spell check commands, along with some HTML tools, such as link and table creators. Writely works a lot like Word, but creates much cleaner HTML code than you'd get by writing a blog post in Word then converting it to HTML code you can paste into your blog application.

2. Save a screen shot of your table data: First, here is an example:



This is a .gif image cropped down from a screen shot of an Excel spreadsheet. It looks exactly the same as it does on my computer, but has one major drawback: It's an image. Users can't use the data without retyping it. To do this, use Print Screen to copy your spreadsheet to your clipboard, then crop and save the image using any photo editor program you happen to have on hand. Load it to your server then include it in your post. How to do that will vary depending on your blogging platform.

3. Use Gmail to create HTML: Gmail will automatically convert most common file formats to HTML for you for free. Here's how you do it:

1. Email a copy of an Excel, Word, or PDF document to yourself at a Gmail.com email address.
2. Preview the document using Gmail's View at HTML feature. 
3. View the document source by clicking View > Source in IE or View > Page Source in FireFox.
4. For Excel files, look for a line starting with <table>. Copy the code from that line through the line ending (and including) </table>.
5. Paste that code into your blog post to add the table with data and formatting.

Here is what the above table looks like after being emailed in Excel, then converted to HTML in Gmail:

	A	B	C
1	Widget Sales
2
3	Month	Units	Sales
4	Jan	200	$4,000
5	Feb	250	$5,000
6		Total	$9,000

 
Not bad. I could clean up the top row and left column with a little editing of the table, or by pasting this into a a WYSIWYG editor that allows me some editing control. For example, I could easily delete the top row and right column using Writely. That would be easier than creating this table from scratch with formatting using that tool. Thanks to A Consuming Experience for sharing this tip on her blog.