Automatic Table Headers in Flare – Guest Post

Maybe you’ve seen me post here, or on Twitter, about our department CSS guy, Matt. Well, he actually does a heck of a lot more than our CSS–he maintains all of our standard department files such as page layouts, table styles, and skins, designs the nitty-gritty, mysterious, techy bits for us when we come up with a department standard, engineers the solutions when management asks for the near-impossible, and provides daily panic support. You need someone like him on your side if you want to be successful with Flare, in my humble opinion. At least, if you’re a shop that will use more than the proverbial 20% of the software.

So, Matt’s been promising a guest post, and here it is–yay! Background: One of our latest team discussions involved whether all of our various tables should have header rows. We’ve hitherto been inconsistent across projects. The upshot: we should all use header rows, and they should be consistently worded. Matt, can we do that? Turns out, not a problem. Read on…

Automatic Table Headings (2 Column Tables)

If you are like me, you might have hundreds, if not thousands of table headings in your documentation and maintaining these headings can be a nightmare. Keeping your tables consistent in documentation can be automatically maintained in your documents with a few very easy steps.

Before you begin, analyze your project(s) and recognize your needs. For my team we needed tables that had Fields / Descriptions and Buttons / Descriptions in the headers.

1. Create a new table style sheet (or edit the existing table style sheet, if you are feeling lucky …. punk) by selecting Project > Add Table Style.
   The Add New Table Style Sheet window is displayed.
2. Enter a file name and click the Add button.
   The table style sheet is created and added to the Content\Resources\TableStyles folder
3. Right-click the style sheet and select the Open with > Internal Text Editor option (or use an external text editor like Notepad++).
4. Locate .TableStyle_TABLENAME_Head_0_0_RowSep_ColSep in the table style sheet code.
   
5. Add mc-auto-number-format: Fields; to the code, similar to the image above. This attribute will be applied to every column except for the last column in the table, if you add additional columns to the table, the auto text: Fields will be displayed.
6. Locate .TableStyle_TABLENAME_Head_0_0_RowSep_ColEnd in the style sheet code.
   
7. Add mc-auto-number-format: Descriptions; to the code, similar to the image above. This attribute will only be applied to the last column in the table.
8. Save the table style sheet.
9. Insert a table by selecting, Table > Insert > Table. Select the new table style sheet and be sure to include one header row. The final product will look like the following:
   

Note: I used the following to create this procedure:

• MadCap Flare v.4.2.1
• TechSmith Jing
• Notepad++

But what about…

Great, we’ll have auto-text in our table header rows. But what about those thousands of inconsistent tables we’ve already got in our projects? If I recall, in the meeting I said, “We’ll just do a find and replace.” Right, Matt? Heh. Stay tuned.