Edit+ Copy/Paste Partial Tables

(Tim Davison) #1

Hi all

 

We are using Edit+ WYSIWYG and it has a very nice new feature where you can copy/paste tables from MSExcel and MSWord documents directly into the WYSIWYG and all the code gets cleaned up and everything is dandy.  Nice piece of functionality, actually.

 

One question - not sure it's an issue or just us asking too much of the engine - is whether you can paste a portion of a table over the top of an existing table, and replace just the cells copied.

 

Example (this is real-world) we have a page summarising Top 100 pages and Top 50 downloads for each of our sites, so between 6-10 tables on the one page.  Each month someone has to go in and update these stats.  It would be much easier if they could highlight the relevant cells (i.e. everything but the header) and select the same in Edit+ and paste.  Similar to pasting multiple rows over highlighted rows in MSWord or MSExcel.

 

We've tried this in both IE8 and FF.  IE8 seems to paste a new table inside the current cell despite highlighting, or simply hang.  FF fares are little better as it seems to actually provide a highlight for cells, but after pasting all the cells get moved and pushed around incorrectly.

 

We can recreate the tables each time, but then we have to re-do things like table summaries, widths, assign headings, etc.  It's little laborious.  1 or 2 not a problem, but this page has a lot and is updated monthly.  So we're trying to copy/paste just the contents, not the entire table.  Possible?

 

Our versions are Matrix v4.12, EES 1.4.2 with Edit+.

 

Cheers

(Scott Hall) #2

Hey Tim

 

You right, this one would actually be very helpful and used regularly, not just by a handful. I myself have gone to do this a few times (even though I know it's not supported) just because of what I normally do when interacting with apps that have supported table editing for a very long time e.g. excel and word.

 

I've added this to our feature roadmap as Idea #4613. This is actually the Viper channel/project of which I think is still locked down to staff only.

 

Cheers

 

Scotty

(Tim Davison) #3

Thanks Scott.  Thought it was pretty advanced functionality for a browser to handle, but good to see it's on the roadmap.  Looking forward to it.

(Joel Porgand) #4

Example (this is real-world) we have a page summarising Top 100 pages and Top 50 downloads for each of our sites....  Each month someone has to go in and update these stats.  It would be much easier if they could highlight the relevant cells (i.e. everything but the header) and select the same in Edit+ and paste.  Similar to pasting multiple rows over highlighted rows in MSWord or MSExcel.

 

I think the real question here is why are these stats being updated manually? Surely it's better to just hook the page up to whatever the data source for these stats is, matrix provides ample tools to let you do so.

(Tim Davison) #5

Very good point, JP.  And one I made myself immediately when I was shown the problem.  It may be off-topic (originally meant the post to be about table pasting) but I'm curious if you have any examples of getting data dynamically from Google Analytics (that's where our stats are).  I know there is an API I could connect in with javascript/ajax.  It looked like a lot to set it up, but that was a long time ago.