Tables and the Rich Content Editor

[swhite3]

Greetings all,

I've been using Canvas and the Rich Content Editor for years now and have been wondering about something for all that time that I hope one of y'all might be able to help with.

I work in a Nursing school where many of our clinical courses are quite complex and so the standard modules and basic page layout options we use for lecture courses just aren't enough.

So, instead, we use tables on our content pages.

And, as you may know, editing tables in Canvas can be... frustrating.

In a perfect world, we'd be able to edit them as easily in Canvas as we can in Word. But we can't. 

So, my question is, has anyone come up with a work flow that actually works to quickly and easily create tables on a Canvas page?

for example, formatting a table in Word is easy, but then copying and pasting it into Canvas deletes most of the formatting and you're left with all text and no CSS. And, I'd love if there were a way to transfer content from one tool (i.e., Word) into Canvas without loosing fidelity.

I hope that all makes sense and thanks in advance for any wisdom you might be able to share.

[TrishaMeyer1]

Hi @swhite3 ,

I'm not sure what your purpose is for using tables. You may want to refer to this blog post about course accessibility and the appropriate use of tables:

Accessibility in Online Course Design

In general tables should not be used for visual appeal or alignment. The purpose of tables is to present data that is to be read in rows and columns, with corresponding headers.

[swhite3]

The courses I'm currently working on are Nursing clinical courses with typically 3 different instructors, two different class times, 6 different clinical groups (students) and 2 or more clinical sites.
So, trying to organize information in a meaningful way means sometimes ignoring other important considerations.

[Ron_Bowman]

@swhite3 -

I thought I worked on something like this on another post and was able to copy the tables from word over, but it may have been excel.

In any case, today I tried direct copy of word to the RCE and like you said everything changes.  I then thought of save as in word.  I saved a table as a html document, opened that document in a text editor (I used notepad++ which I highly recommend for a text editor on windows systems), copied the html source code from that text into the html view in the RCE and what was in that file remained.  however, I did lose some of the formatting on borders in the table.  

So, my advice is to try converting the word document to html and importing that code.  Or try excel and see what you get there as well.

Ron

[swhite3]

Thanks so much! I will absolutely give this a try!

Cheers!