Sorting Table items in Robohelp 8

[Grimgrock]

I  have several tables (up to 26) that I need to add many items to that need to be  in alphabetical order. I thought there was a way to sort table items in  Robohelp HTML but I cannot find it. The help doesn't provide any guidance  either. I have tried copying/pasting the entire table into Excel and Word but  neither results in a table being pasted. It pastes all the text but the table is  gone. The result being column one text followed by column 2 text under it (the  results in Word being more usable than those in Excel). I'm looking for any  solution that doesn't have me doing the sort manually. I am using Robohelp 8.

Any solution - creative or otherwise - is greatly appreciated.

Mike

[Peter Grainge]

See Tables on my site. There is a method there and whilst I haven't tested it in RH8, I think it will still be good. I would be interested to hear your results.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

[Grimgrock]

I wish I could say this is what I needed but it actually gives more functionality than I need.

What I have is a big glossary. Each table represents a letter. Obviously, I want the terms to be in alpha order. I don't need sort buttons or anything like that at the top of the table. I have a huge number of new terms that I should just be able to amend to the end of the table(s), click sort, and then have the terms be sorted alphabetically. At this point, I'm looking at doing it manually which will take a long time.

I know this isn't the most elegant solution for a glossary but it is what the customer wants.

Thanks,

Mike

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Mike.

I'm not awarw of that type of functionality in any application with tables. They have a linear concept. It sounds like what you need is some sort of database/spreadsheet solution that would allow item sorting. Have you tried maintaining in Excel and exporting to HTML before importing the file into RH? Just a thought.

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Read the RoboColum(n) for a tips,  tricks and musings on the Technical Communication Suite products.

[Amebr]

If I have a large table I need to resort, I save a temp file elsewhere and open in Word. Use the sort functionality in Word and Save As HTML (Filtered).

Then I open the htm file in a text editor with HTML and regular expression support and strip out all but the basic table, td, etc tags.

Then I copy and paste just the table code back into my original topic in RH HTML view and reformat there.

It's ugly, but for large tables quicker than manually copying and pasting individual cells.

Having said that, I've noticed that you can copy and past multiple rows now in RH8. However there is one bug. If you copy multiple cells that have hyperlinks in them, copying them into a different part of the table breaks all of the links - RH helpfully adds duplicate and hardcoded path information to each link.

If you only do one cell it seems to keep the correct path information.

HTH

[Peter Grainge]

Have you reported that as a bug.

http://www.Adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform&product=38

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

[Amebr]

Not yet.

Bug report submitted.

Message was edited by: Amebr

[kmaddox1]

Thanks, Amebr, for the very helpful instructions. I have four gi-normous tables I have to put into alphabetic order and they're filled with hyperlinks. While the process you describe is tedious, it appears to work perfectly. Also, I think that one of the steps in your procedure is not needed with RH8. After opening the sorted table in Notepad or other text editor, you can simply copy all of the table code (from <table> to </table>) and paste it into HTML view in RH. When you first view the table, it will look awful but applying a table style and clicking Clean Table Inline Formatting causes RH to automatically strip out the unncessary formats that were added in Word.

[NL_Derek-56V59O]

I have given some notes on table importing in http://forums.adobe.com/thread/650531

--- Derek