When writing an answer like the one here, I felt the need to create tables to display summarized data. Since I believe we are a site that encourages users to provide detailed data whenever possible, I was surprised to find after discussing with several folks that there is no easy way to create a searchable, consistently formatted, visually attractive table. The options that I am aware of are:
- Create table in another program, then screen capture and post the image.
- This option is not searchable, and will also likely produce many different visual looks. You can see I screen cap'd simple html formatted tables, but I could have easily screen cap'd an excel spreadsheet, or output from another similar program.
- Indent four spaces and use a the monospace font to make a text table.
- I originally took this to be the best, if somewhat tedious solution, since it is fully searchable. I quickly found that a table that easily fits with html formatting was far too wide to fit with the default monospaced font. So I could either greatly alter the data in my table to fit within space constraints, or go the image route - which is what I did.
Is there another solution I'm not aware of? If not, do others agree that this feature would be valuable (and ultimately can it be added)?