Best way to import multiple Word tables

[ccardimon]

Thanks to forum inhabitants, I was able to import a Word table from a document.

Following my success, things have changed slightly, so I'm starting a new thread.

What is the best way to import a Word file that contains several Word tables?

Additionally, I discovered the text that is available is part of the header and footer of each page. Weird.

I learned how to import one Word table at a time, is there a way to import multiple Word tables at the same time?

[phanna]

Has anyone answered this post? I couldn't see. I'm currently importing a word document that contains many tables. None of the tables are coming into Flare properly. In fact, the word table style is not even being recognized by Flare.

Any ideas? Having to apply table styles after the fact within Flare will be incredibly time consuming and heinous.

Cheers,
Paula

[ccardimon]

Nope. No one answered. I believe your answer the honest one: heinous and timeconsuming.

[wclass]

... heinous and timeconsuming.

I don't think I can recomend a "best way", but I can list some of the problems I have come across - unfortunately, that takes up a bit of space.

If you want to maintain just the look and feel of the imported tables, and not edit them in Flare, then the best way is to have the following Import settings:
Stylesheet tab: clear the selected style sheet, set "Preserve MS styles".
This works if you are generating web or HTML help from existing Word documents that will be maintained in Word - works pretty well for the look but there are lots of inline styles that you wouldn't want to have to edit later on.

However, if you plan to continue the content maintenance in Flare, you have to do something different. The best practice for importing Word for Flare updates is to NOT preserve the Word styles, but map them to an existing stylesheet:
Stylesheet tab: SELECT your main style sheet, CLEAR "Preserve MS styles".

In this case, tables come across as pretty clean HTML, but are not mapped to any table style - you'd have to do that manually (a global find/replace should work). They default to whatever your table, tr, td settings are (we set these in our ordinary style sheet).

However, the import loses the notion of table headers. All my table styles in Flare are created using <thead> and <th> elements - those elements won't exist in the imported tables even if they are set in Word. Header rows from Word don't come through using Copy/Past either.

My Word tables use styles like "tableHead, tableBody, tableList" that I can map to Flare styles (p.tableHead, etc). This works fairly well, but row shading does not seem to import correctly.

If you use Word "table styles" your imported tables are likely to have random settings. There are some known "issues" with Word table styles where they sometimes take precedence over standard styles and other times don't - there is not enough space to cover these issues here.

Summary - If your tables are simple, no shading, and use Word styles inside them, then create styles in Flare as classes of <p>, and map these on import. If you have a table class you can probably assign it using a global find/replace once the import is complete.
If your tables are not simple, all bets are off.

Feature requests (possibly):
- If there is a Word "header" row in a table, map it to thead, th entries.
- Or, specify that the first row of a table be treated as a header.
- Have an Import "table styles" tab that lets you map different tables to different table styles.
- Have a "convert text to table" function in Flare - it would often be easier to start with plain text and work from there.