Daily Dose of Excel

Writing for Wikipedia is a bit like writing in your third language—you know there are words for it, but your guides are from your second language—Wiki pour Les Nuls or maybe Wiki para Maniquíes. It’s a different dialect of HTML. Having done it for several years, Wikipedia’s goal seems to be a reduction in keystrokes to be saved on its servers. For example, to italicize, rather than using the i- or em- tags, you use paired apostrophes (not double-quotes) to lead and close, saving at least three key strokes. To embolden, you use three apostrophes to lead and close, saving at least one stroke over the b- or strong- tags. And bold italics is thus five apostrophes leading, five apostrophes closing, saving at least four strokes. An unordered list’s members are just lines started with an asterisk, and an ordered list’s members are lines started with a pound sign. This economy follows into Wiki tables, where pipes (“|”) and curly braces (“{}”)are used for all the tags. There is a good summary of the table markup differences here. This little table:

 
In Wiki is this:

as opposed to this:

If you have a table like this is in your spreadsheet:

 
The MakeWikiTable() macro will make a table like this for Wikipedia:

And this table G33:H38

 
where H34: = Text(J34, "0.00") & K34 is aligned right and filled down, looks like this:

Tapping into the class = “wikitable”, MakeWikiTable() can make any combination of sortable, collapsible, and collapsed tables. It invokes the class if the upper left table cell is not empty, and thus your (literally) first column is data vice row headers. There is a longstanding bug in the wikitable class that disables sorting if there is too much adornment given the table, no matter if the table is set as “sortable” or not. The combinations look like this in Wikipedia:

All these examples are available here. You’ll see the footnotes you created in Excel are at the bottom of the Wiki page. It looks different at Wiki Commons, but the code still works. Examples of a tables I made there with MakeWikiTable() are these. You’ll see it uses a sideways arrow instead of text for hide and show.

This is the MakeWikiTable code:

Note that the Caption is at Offset(1,0) from the your selected table. Wikipedia’s examples all use muted grays for the headers. The first two of the following are the provided colors, the third, aka “silver” is what I used above.

The macro should be invoked from a form instead of daisy-chained message boxes. I got lazy. The MakeFracs() function is here. If you want to put something in the upper-left cell, and still get row headers, put it in after you paste your table into Wikipedia.

… mrt
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HTML5 provides for fractional representation of halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, no sevenths, and eighths. Excel has a fractional number format. This post is about bringing these concepts together for exporting an Excel table into Wiki or HTML designs. The basic representations are:

 
The format for the name is &fracnd; where n is the numerator and d is the denominator. Thus ½ is a half, and ⅞ is seven-eighths. The HTML code representations for these are:

 
In theory (more on “in practice” later) every representation in a row is equivalent. This is our test table to export to Wiki or HTML format:

 
Cell D1: =CHAR(32)&ROW()&”/”&COLUMN()-3, then fill down and right. The right hand column has a few test cases. I used that formulaic construction to keep Excel from doing the divisions. The Excel fractional format is “# ?/?” for single digit denominators. The intermediary space is important. It indicates that a fraction may follow, just as a forward slash indicates a fraction may be present. And a format of /?? is a fraction not translatable into HTML5. Turning these patterns into VBA, this is my MakeFracs() function. It checks that there is a slash, then that there is not a slash–digit–digit pattern, and finally that there is a “space–digits 1 through 7–slash–digits 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8″ pattern to screen out sevenths and ninths. If all of those pass, it substitutes in the &fracnd; formulation for the fraction.

 
At least that’s all I wanted it to do. In practice, Wikipedia and WordPress seem to be not fully onboard with HTML5 and do not handle all fifteen &fracnd; formats (I confirmed Firefox does). That added “j-loop” in the middle translates the &fracnd;’s into Dec code. This works fine, though it’s a step back from HTML5. Option is given to use Hex if desired. Your Excel table then looks like this:

 
Where N1: =MakeFracs(D1) filled down and right. Arranged that way you can see the HTML5 design thoughts. The very ugly website would look like this:

 
Frankly, I’m not sure that this is an improvement. You’ll come across Wikipedia editors, however, who are convinced of it. I thought about adding a trailing space, as in MakeFracs = VBA.Replace(Arg, sOUT, sIN & Chr(32)), but for every time I wanted to, I thought of an example where I didn’t, and the logic got very convoluted. Better I decided to put the space in the table where wanted and not in the function. My HTML tablemaker is here, but it’s being overcome by the hard steady march of technology. Wiki and CSS tablemakers are coming up. I used MakeFracs() in the above. No fractions were harmed in the making of this post.

…mrt
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Hi everyone!

As you may have seen on some blogs, Microsoft now enables you to include any Excel file -or parts thereof- in your web pages and blog posts.

For example (yes you can make changes to the cells, they are not retained):

I have written an article that explains how this is done.

Even more: I have also created a demo where you can enter information in a web form (a textbox), which in turn updates information in the embedded Excel web app file.

Enjoy the read: Embedding Excel files on your website

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
www.jkp-ads.com