When you are doing a comparison or writing a detailed post, sometime adding a table helps to deliver the message in the right way. In WordPress, there are multiple ways by which you can add tables in your blog post. One of the most popular plugin to add table in WordPress is TablePress, but you might not like to be dependent on a plugin for adding tables in 1-2 blog posts. Is int it?
There are few alternate ways by which you can insert tables in WordPress, and today I will be sharing about one WordPress plugin which you should install now and it will enhance the functionality of your WordPress editor. If you are wondering why I used “insert tables without plugin”, here is the explanation: The plugin which I’m talking about is TinyMCE Advanced which enhances the feature of WordPress WYSIWYG editor, and even though you use this plugin to insert tables or do advance formatting, disabling the plugin will not affect your formatting. This plugin just helps you to do advanced customisation in post editor with the help of HTML and you can disable the plugin anytime.
How to use TinyMCE Advanced to add Tables and format your blog post?
After using this plugin I realised how essential this plugin is and it should be a part of your WordPress core features. Since it’s not, you should add this plugin in your WordPress blog (Plugin link) and it will enable advanced formatting feature in your WordPress post editor.
In this guide I will show you how to insert tables using this plugin, and some more features that you get after activating this plugin. Once you have downloaded and activated the plugin, you can configure the settings from Settings > TinyMCE Advanced and this is what configuration page looks like:
You can drag and drop buttons from Unused buttons section to toolbar and click on save changes. This way, you will be able to see the buttons in your WordPress editor section for advanced formatting. Once you are done with this, click on create new post and here you can start with advanced formatting along with inserting tables into your WordPress post.
Inserting Table into WordPress post :
Go to write new post> and select the tables and select the number of row and column you need for your tables. (See below screenshot)
Once the table is added, you can click the corner of the table to resize the table to fit perfectly into your blog post. That is it, now starting filling the row and columns, and you can add new rows or column into an existing table anytime. You can always click on tables > Table properties and define the background and border color to beautify it.
Don’t limit yourself with only adding tables using this plugin, as there are more advanced formatting feature which you will love after using this plugin. Here are few features which I liked the most:
- Font size: Select ant text and you can define the font size of the text.
- Subscript and superscript.
- Background color : Select any text and add a background color to it.
- Horizontal line: With one click add a horizontal line.
As I mentioned above this plugin should be a part of WordPress core features, and since it’s not, go ahead and install it to enjoy advanced formatting in WordPress. If you know of similar plugin do let me know via comments.
I was looking for a way to make tables WITHOUT a plugin because I have a free wordpress site and cannot afford to upgrade to a Business plan which you have to do in order to use plugins.
Good table plugin but not mobile friendly.
The table right side get clipped in mobile view.
Thanks for this wonderful post Harsh. This plugin (or quasi-plugin) looks awesome. But unfortunately, the table is showing in my WP admin but not on the live site. I am using the 2014 theme. Any reason why it could be so?
Hi Harsh,
This plugin is awesome and I found it very useful….it is easy too.
Thanks
This should be useful. I run a personal finance website and often have to paste data as tables from excel – and I either paste as table or as enhanced metafile. My issue is that if I paste as table, I lose my formatting and if I paste as metafile, I lose valuable data that can add to article length.
This plugin seems very useful – let me give it a shot and see.
Thanks!
Tiny MCE Advanced plugin looks good but are there any other alternatives to insert a table without using the plugin??
I hope that Plugins work for pro users of wordpress but not for free bloggers, so need alternate way to insert tables as it is very critical.
How can we insert table in blogger post?
Plugin works well, however the outputted markup is semantically incorrect as it doesn’t produce thead / th tags. Still useful though if your CSS isn’t dependent on those tags being present.
Hey,
Thanks for the easiest way
but i know about it
i want know how to break page
like reading review on gsmarena you will see no. of pages
i want to know about that please
Hey Harsh,
Wonderful ! It will be very useful to the people like me who don’t have any technical knowledge on HTML Code.This plugin will be really useful when you have product specific blog because the table format will give you a short & clear idea on Features,price,comparison etc..
Thanks
It is goodway, But I would prefer to first do the table in excel and then paste and the so the formatting.
The TinyMCE is good but, when we select the table size, initially it gets added like a bundle of lines, we need to do lot of formatting
Thanks for the timesaver tip about using TinyMCE plugin for creating tables in the blog post.
The beauty of this plugin is that even if we deactivate / disable this plugin after creating the table in the blog post, it won’t affect the formatting of the table. In a way this plugin would not put load on the website unlike other plugins which need to be remain active / enabled in order to keep the formatting of the table.
Just enable the plugin to create the table—>publish the post—>and disable the puglin.
Thanks once again Harsh.
Harsh,
You are such a life saver. I have recently migrate to WordPress and facing issue while preparing table. I tried to paste from word or excel but it was not working. This is so useful for me. Thanks a lot for sharing this article at the right time for me 🙂
I was using table press for that but now I got easiest trick i will change with this TinyMCE
I am using both TablePress and TinyMCE plugins on my blog. I wasn’t aware that I could use TinyMCE to add tables to blog posts. If TinyMCE works great for me, I will deactivate TablePress. Thanks for letting me know this feature.
If your hosting is not that much good like cheap hosting then its better to keep less number plugins installed on your WordPress blog. And do this kind of job without plugins is really cool. Thanks for this lovely tips.
This article was just reading. Actually, I think we must also know a bit of coding related to WordPress because their are many plugins available for every task but as you know plugins are always not the solution and you can’t go good with your website buried in plugins.
Thanks for sharing …!
Hi,
It’s not good to use lots of plugin in wordpress.poorly coded plugins might slow down site or affect the performance of site.So, I suggest to use code for such functionalities if you can,otherwise plugin is option.
By the way, Nice explanation about plugin.
Thanks
Hey Harsh
Thanks For The Easiest ways to insert a table .
instead of that you can also use html codes if you have a knowledge .
-Aditya
Directly using HTML codes won’t work on WordPress, instead, it will strip off the HTML properties.
The only way of adding Tables is either by this way or by using tablepress.