WordPad Tables for Dummies

Using the WordPad Insert Object menu

Some weeks, the staffers here at the Antisocial Network put together some sort of theme. For one week, it's all about a given topic; for other weeks, the theme is all posts from a given site. Although we're not in a theme right now, it seems that we're on a streak of eHow.com contributors who found it convenient to use their own definition of a critical term in a search question scraped from Google, or to choose the easy way out by some other means. Heather Wilkins did both in her Techwalla.com post, "How to Create a Table in WordPad."

Wilkins sidestepped the real answer – "You can't!" – in favor of interpreting the question as "How do you create a table with WordPad?" Her tricky interpretation went even deeper, however, as she decided that the question was really, "How to you create an HTML table with WordPad?" And off she went... had she given the real answer, she wouldn't have been paid her $15 (and someone else would have done the same MSU¹ job on the "title."

Heather's original was full of html tags in angle brackets, so the lousy porting job performed by Leaf Group left her readers with instructions like,

"Start the table with the        tags:

Add a row to your table with the       tag: "

We went back and looked at the original with the WayBack Machine at archive.org, and her instructions were pretty much on point; actually saying to

"Start the table with the <table> tags:
<table>
</table>..."

She went on from there to tell her readers to save the text as an html file, then open it with a web browser. Sorry, Heather, that's not creating a table in WordPad, that's displaying a table in Chrome (or Safari, or whatever). You can't edit the table, can't update it, can't format it, nothing.

Apparently Wilkins noticed that, so she attempted to perform some sort of "set columns" process using the tab setting on the WordPad ruler. That worked for crap, meaning that our Dumbass of the Day failed her assignment not once but twice.
The real answer? You can't create a native table, but you can use the "Insert Object" menu and either fill in your table or attach one that's already been created. It's really quite simple!

¹ Make Shit Up.

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