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Help:Introduction to tables with VisualEditor/All

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Tables are a common way of displaying data. This tutorial provides a guide on making new tables and editing existing ones. For guidelines on when and how to use tables, see the Manual of Style.

This tutorial will introduce the basics of inserting, editing and formatting tables of information. Some advanced features, such as colouring cells, are not yet available with VisualEditor and have to be edited using Wiki Markup.

To use the information presented here, one should enable the visual editor for one's account. To enable it, go to Preferences, click Editing, check the "Enable the visual editor" box, and then click the Save button at the bottom. Once one has done this, while editing, one will be able to switch between source editing and the visual editor by clicking the pencil icon in the upper right.

Editing tables

To edit the contents of an existing table in VisualEditor, simply double-click on a cell. You can then change the text, links and references, just like anywhere else in the article.

To format a cell, just click once to select it. You can then use the Content cell  menu to designate it as a header.

The A  menu also allows you to make cells bold or italic.

Finally, you can merge cells, by selecting a set of cells, then clicking the "Merge" button.

Adding new tables

Insert a blank table

To add a new, blank table, go to the Insert  menu and select the "Table" option.

Once you've chosen the number of rows and columns, it will be inserted into the article so that you can add in the contents for each cell.

Pressing Tab ↹ will select the cell to the right.

Pressing ↵ Enter will select the cell below.

Insert a table of information

Alternatively, you can copy the cells of any spreadsheet (e.g. Excel) and paste them into the editing area.

Similarly, you can import an entire existing table by dragging a comma-separated value (.csv) file from your computer into the editing window.

Expanding tables

To add a column or row, you need to define where you want to insert it. Once you've selected a cell, a triangle will appear at the top of the column, and the left of the row.

Clicking on the top triangle allows you to add a new column before or after the selected one (or delete it). Similarly, clicking the left triangle allows you to add or remove rows.

See also