View source for Help:Lists and tables

The formatting of tables is unfortunately not easy in MediaWiki. Tables are build up with a pipe syntax defining the single rows and cells. Before you start to learn that, please consider the possibility to transform spreadsheet formats to wiki-syntax! You can find more help for tables [[Help:tables|here]].
==Spreadsheet to wiki table format==
To convert from spreadsheets such as Gnumeric, MS Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc, go [http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdouglas/table.cgi here]. Here you find a perfect converter that gives you wiki syntax back. Just copy the wikitext into the editor and you have your table.
You can save a lot of time compared to start formatting your table directly in the editor and this method is suitable to cover a wide range of reqirements.
For more special cases, e.g. if you need to conect cells, you need at least some practice with the pipe syntax.

==Pipe syntax tutorial==
To try out the pipe syntax for tables you can use the [[sandbox]].

Here you can see an example of wiki-syntax for a simple table and the resulting outcome below it:
 <nowiki>
 {| class="wikitable"
 |-
 ! header 1
 ! header 2
 ! header 3
 |-
 | row 1, cell 1
 | row 1, cell 2
 | row 1, cell 3
 |-
 | row 2, cell 1
 | row 2, cell 2
 | row 2, cell 3
 |}
 </nowiki>

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! header 1
! header 2
! header 3
|-
| row 1, cell 1
| row 1, cell 2
| row 1, cell 3
|-
| row 2, cell 1
| row 2, cell 2
| row 2, cell 3
|}

For more detailed help about tables see [[Help:tables|tables]].