Forum:Tables need headers

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Although it can be intimidating at first, making a table in wikicode is actually pretty easy, particularly because we've made it simple to style tables using {{prettytable}}. But you do have to know what all the little symbols do:

Symbol	What it does
{|	starts a table
|}	ends a table
!	declares that this row will define column header(s)
||	declares the end of a cell
|	declares the start of a new row
|-	declares the end of a row

What's really important here is the difference between a pipe (|) and an exclamation point (!). If you start the second line of your table — that is, the line that has all the column titles — with a pipe, you'll still get a table. But the resulting table will have no true header.

For instance, an awful lot of tables wrongly use the pipe like this:

{| {{prettytable}}
| Writer || Director || Producer
|-
| Russell T Davies || Euros Lyn || Phil Collinson
|-
|}

This produces the following:

Writer	Director	Producer
Russell T Davies	Euros Lyn	Phil Collinson

Okay, that's a table, technically. But it's got no header. See how you can mouseover the first row just as easily as the second? That shouldn't be happening.

What you need to do, therefore, is to actually declare the writer/director/producer line as the table header. You do this by beginning that line with an exclamation mark, not a pipe. Here's the right way to make a table with wikicode:

{| {{prettytable}}
! Writer || Director || Producer
|-
| Russell T Davies || Euros Lyn || Phil Collinson
|-
|}

It's a tiny change. But notice the dramatic difference in the output:

Writer	Director	Producer
Russell T Davies	Euros Lyn	Phil Collinson

Notice that you can, if you wish, use multiple exclamation points:

Method A	Method B
You can start the line with an exclamation point and then separate each new header with double pipes like this: ! Writer || Director || Producer	Or you can put one header per line, and start each line with an exclamation point. It's the same thing. ! Writer !Director !Producer

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 05:51: Mon 14 May 2012