TMF Table Formatter
The method of adding a table to a Motley Fool post is described in the Motley Fool help page: http://www.fool.co.uk/help/community/discussion-boards-help/#includingatable
Although this works, many users experience problems, especially with large tables. Another problem is that tables often have their source in spreadsheets (Excel, OpenOffice, LibreOffice) and there is no easy way to transfer the data.
A solution using an Excel macro is available here http://tmffinancialsoftware.weebly.com/export-excel-data-to-tmf.html . This works very well but is limited to users on Excel on a Windows OS.
This web page allows data to be copied and pasted from a spreadsheet, and formats the data (by inserting the appropriate number of spaces) in a form that can be copied and pasted into a Motley Fool post.
Detailed instructions are available at the bottom of this page.
Although this works, many users experience problems, especially with large tables. Another problem is that tables often have their source in spreadsheets (Excel, OpenOffice, LibreOffice) and there is no easy way to transfer the data.
A solution using an Excel macro is available here http://tmffinancialsoftware.weebly.com/export-excel-data-to-tmf.html . This works very well but is limited to users on Excel on a Windows OS.
This web page allows data to be copied and pasted from a spreadsheet, and formats the data (by inserting the appropriate number of spaces) in a form that can be copied and pasted into a Motley Fool post.
Detailed instructions are available at the bottom of this page.
Input Text:
Output Text:
User Guide
The step-by-step process is:
Notes:
- Paste tab-delimited data into the Input Text box
- Determine how you want to separate columns in the formatted output. As a default, columns are separated by " | " (space followed by a vertical bar followed by a space)
- Click on the "Create Formatted Text" button
- Copy the text in the Output Text box (click within the Output Text box, CTRL-A to select all the text then CTRL-C to copy to the clipboard) and paste it into a Motley Fool post
- If you want to repeat the exercise, click on the "Clear Text Boxes" button and this will remove all text in the Input Text and Output Text boxes
Notes:
- Data can be copied and pasted directly from an Excel, OpenOffice or LibreOffice spreadsheet.
Note that any cells which contain a linefeed (maybe to create a two-line header) will cause incorrect formatting of the rows containing those cells.
In this case it is better to have the headers in the spreadsheet over two rows - Data can also be copied and pasted from a word-processor such as Microsoft Word, or from a plain-text editor such as Notepad
- If you wish to type data directly into the Input Text box, note that hitting the TAB key will not create a tab character (this is an inherent feature of web pages). With a Windows OS, a tab character can be created by holding down the ALT key, typing 09 on the numeric keypad, the releasing the ALT key
- Formatted output makes each column the width of the widest element in the column. Numeric data is right-justified and non-numeric data is left-justified.
- To prevent the rightmost character in one column being next to the leftmost character of the next column, a column separator is automatically inserted. The default separator is " | " (space followed by a vertical bar followed by a space).This default can be changed by typing your preferred separator in the Output Text Column Separator field. A single space might be preferred to reduce the width of very wide tables.
- Tables are often very wide due to the width of each column header. This can be text-wrapped in Excel to reduce the problem but will be full-width with this tool. If column headers are very long, it might be worth splitting the headers into two rows in Excel before copying into this tool.
- The output text is preceded by <pre> and followed by </pre>. These tags should be included when copying a pasting to a Motley Fool post.
- When creating the Motley Fool post, you may included normal text before the <pre> tag or after the </pre> tag. Do not insert text between the two tags.
- The "Clear Text Boxes" button only clears the text boxes, it does not change the value of the Column Separator
- If you want to practice, use the Motley Fool test board: http://boards.fool.co.uk/test-50928.aspx