Posted by & filed under How To.

This blog post will show you how to create tables of data and insert them into a WordPress site.

Lots of data is best expressed as a table, for example:

  • competition results
  • staff telephone directories
  • branches of a shop
  • outlets that stock a particular product

Sometimes a plain table is great, sometimes you want a person who comes on your site to be able to filter or sort the table. In this blog post we will show you how to do both.

Creating The Table

We will create the table in the Vixo online spreadsheet and drop it into a WordPress page with the Vixo plugin. The spreadsheet part looks exactly as you would expect:

Create a table in the Vixo spreadsheet

Inserting a plain table

The Vixo spreadsheet is an Excel-compatible spreadsheet, so formatting the table is straightforward. (Read up on how to use the spreadsheet).

Lets start by making a simple table. When when have laid out the data as we want in the spreadsheet, we simply publish the spreadsheet as a webpage using the Views menu at the right-hand end of the toolbar:

Publish a vixo spreadsheet table as a webpage

This table has been inserted using the Vixo shortcode:

[vixo url='http://wordpress-demo.vixo.com/tabular-data/a1:d7']

Creating a sortable table

We can create a sortable table in the spreadsheet using the Vixo function table.

This looks like:

This table has been inserted using the Vixo shortcode:

[vixo url='http://wordpress-demo.vixo.com/tabular-data/a9:a9']

Try it yourself

To have a go yourself: install the Vixo plugin and then get a Vixo spreadsheet:

There are other ways to create tables in Vixo – including special tables driven by database functions.

  • Randy LaTour

    can i use this for a complex Excel worksheet with formulas and hidden columns?
    how about conditional formats?

    • Gordon Guthrie

      You can create complex worksheets – the documentation is pretty comprehensive – it shows the 150 odd Excel compatible functions implemented:
      http://documentation.vixo.com/

      Hiding stuff and making spreadsheet pages locked down forms is very easy – there are some simple getting started videos online:

      http://vixo.com/getting-started/

      There are no conditional formats I am afraid.