What's the easiest way to create a couple columns in a post?

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1

Tabs don’t work. Multiple spaces get compressed into one. How in the world do you get a couple columns in a post? I’ve been resorting to …

Bob…Author
Jonathan…Actor
Jason…Musician

looks like pretty bad because it doesn’t always line up evenly. I don’t know what else to do. This board doesn’t seem to recognize bbcode for tables.

This was generated with a Free BBCode Table Generator and this board doesn’t recognize it. Is there some customized code I need?

What does work here?

[th]Name[/th]
[th]Occupation[/th]


Tom
author


Bill
actor


George
musician


Bobby
actor
2 


Bob                Author
Tom                Actor
Jason              Musician

There’s Code tags, you’re still not going to get everything to line up with these fonts, but it’ll preserve the spaces.

ETA, it took some playing to get it lined up even that well (and it probably doesn’t like the same on every screen/browser). You can hit the quote button on my post to see exactly what I did if you need to.

3

That’s an improvement over … the code tags may be the easiest solution.

Thanks

4

I construct the table in Excel, add code tags, and mess around with it. I usually end up doing further work in a text editor, IIRC. Here’s one example from an old thread:



Q7 (Figure 4)	                had    	Paid  
			      contact   bribe    product
Education system	        29%	11%	 0.033 
Judicial System	                13%	15%	 0.020 
Medical and health services	56%	6%	 0.032 
Police	                        20%	7%	 0.014 
Registry and permit service	21%	14%	 0.029 
Utilities	                52%	6%	 0.030 
Tax	                        28%	9%	 0.025 
Land Services	                16%	17%	 0.027 
			
		                           sum	 0.210

Quote the post and paste the above into a text editor that displays tabs and spaces and you can see my work.

5

Stuff within code tags is displayed in a fixed-width font, so you can use blank spaces to line things up in columns, and it will be perfectly predictable, presumably for all browsers.

The only problem is, while you are typing it all into the edit window, it’s displayed in the usual font, which is not fixed-width. So you have to count the blank spaces very carefully.

Better method: Fire up any plain-old-plain-text editor of your choice, and compose your table there. Then go into the VBulletin text input window, and cut-and-paste your table from the plain-old-plain-text editor to there. Surround your table with
[noparse]



   . . . .
   . . . .
   . . . .

[/noparse]
tags.

6

Easy enough. I’ll use Notepad to compose the table and then paste into code tags. Thanks.