Tables are one of the most helpful, but also infuriating aspects of web design. They can be invaluable for organising items on your page, but can also be a bit of a headache to set up. Here’s how tables work in the School Jotter interface.
You can insert tables into any regular text object in Jotter, click where you’d like to put your table, then click this button in the toolbar at the top:
The easiest way to put in a table is through the “Insert table” option, mouse over it and this matrix will pop up.
You can then pick how big you want your table to be – bear in mind you’ll need header rows at the top, sides or both. If you’ve used Microsoft Word, this should all be pretty familiar to you.
You can then type the text into the cells which have appeared. You can adjust your table’s properties in various ways. First of all, the Table properties.
By default, the table will fill the width and height of the space you give it, but you can change that here. Additionally, cell padding determines the distance between the cell contents and the cell borders. Alignment determines whether it’s left, centre or right-aligned. Note that, by default, your table will not have any borders – you’ll need to add these in both the table and cell properties menus.
You might also want to take a look at the Advanced tab for some more interesting customisation options. Note that these are also available for individual cells and rows via the other options in the table menu:
If you’re familiar with HTML markup, you can put custom styles in the box at the top – otherwise we recommend leaving this blank. The other options are relatively straightforward – Border width is how wide the cell borders are, Border style is what style they’re in, and the two colour options determine border and background colours of the table.
Some of the more advanced capabilities of the table are available through the Cell, Row and Column menu options. These will allow you to perform actions such as merging cells, for example to provide info like below, for Mr W:
Want to add or remove rows or columns? Again, under the Row and Column options you can insert/remove these. Note that, in the case of inserts, they will be inserted above (rows) or to the left of (columns) your current cursor position.
And that’s pretty much all there is to it! Tables are one of the oldest text items still used on the web, and it’s not hard to see why!
