User:Buaidh/Wikitables

Easy maintenance of large wikitables

The following is a brief description of an easy method of updating a wikitable using a word processor, such as Microsoft Word™, and a spreadsheet application, such as Microsoft Excel™.

1. Edit the Wikimedia section containing the wikitable. Copy and paste the wikitable as Unicode text into a word document.
2. Replace all paragraph marks ^p with tab marks ^t.
3. Replace all occurrences of ^t|- with ^p|-.
4. Copy and paste all text into a spreadsheet as unformatted Unicode text.
5. If your wikitable is a simple table (without rowspan= or colspan=), you should have a simple spreadsheet with every cell containing the code for the corresponding cell of the wikitable. More elaborate wikitables will require manual manipulation.
6. Edit data in the spreadsheet.
7. Copy and paste spreadsheet cells into a word document as unformatted Unicode text.
8. Remove tabs by replacing all tab marks^t with nothing.
9. Replace wikitable with the text from the word document.