Brendan Hughes

Help!

I have to create a comparative grid/table, preferably in HTML format, in a week. Size about 300 rows by 35 columns. Column headers will contain country names (sub-divided into 2), row headers (left column) will contain chemical substance names (5-40 characters, say 15 char. average), and all the cells in the middle will contain 1-4 chars. Then need to upload it on our website.

Trouble is, as each country has exceptions, I would like to footnote or hyperlink the country name to an explanation of the exception at the bottom, as well as explaining certain bits of the data itself.

If we do it in Excel, it looks pretty ugly, and I can only get comments rather than footnotes. It also relies on the general public having Excel, I know most do but there are still a few die-hards out there.

If we do it in PDF, probably from Excel, it's almost impossible to get the comments/footnotes. They come out with obscure cell refs on page 7 of the document.

My wish is to do it in HTML, but I have created the table with horiz and vertical headers, and filled 5% of the cells, and it's already over 500KB, so it keeps hanging while I work on it. Also takes an age for the thing to load on the website for the user.

Apart from splitting it 4 countries at a time (I have 16), which I'm loathe to do as it is supposed to be comparative, does anyone have any good suggestions?

NB the above huge file was created by saving an Excel table as HTML. I know MS puts in lots of extra tags, but I thought I'd filtered those off using Dreamweaver 4. (Or is that only for Word HTML?)

Pls ask if clarification needed!

Thanks in advance

BJH

Brendan Hughes

Thanks for the suggestions, Chiark

Well, I didn't realise just how much crap DW puts in until I tried creating a table from scratch in it (rather than importing from Excel). On a table of 250x20 (bare minimum), it jumped from 160KB to 280KB just to ask it to justify all cell entries, in other words, to look tidy!

Not sure about writing it myself, I know considerably less about writing HTML code than my dog . And no, don't suggest my dog to do it either

The idea of doing it in two stages would be great, just I don't see how I have time and whether our website would support it, as the table itself is one entry in a custom-built database - surely it would all get a bit too dynamic? (interactive table within a database sounds a bit messy to me!)

See, this is the problem. They pay peanuts, they get monkeys. Gibber.

No other easy solutions out there?

BJH

ChristianR

iTrader: (1)

why not make a databse (say in access or sql) and make it so it uses asp to pull the data from it..

u should really be using a database program for such big amount of data.

chiark

Brendan,

how much "crap" does dreamweaver chuck in for every definition? I've never used a table that big, but I daresay with a bit of cunning planning you'd be able to automate writing the table with the minimum data <TR><TD>Col1Row1</TD><TD>Col2Row1</TD><TR>... etc

May be worth populating a "test" table of that sort of size and seeing how that loads before deciding that its the way to go?

Given that you're trying to do a comparison, I'd be tempted to split it into two stages: first, the user selects what they want to compare using checkboxes in a table form, then after that they get all the 35 columns of comparison.

Is that possible? I think you need to rationalise the amount of data you're trying to present, particularly for it to be of most value.

Nick.

Ian Griffiths

The database route sounds alright, you could certainly automate the production of the page if you generated it from a database query rather than typing all the stuff manually in to your raw HTML code.

Of course you would then just simply save the page and serve that. No sense doing a database look up if the data doesn't change.

I dare say writing it in raw code would be a lot more efficient, in fact I did a few calculations based on using style sheets to format the cells, and including a hyper link in every data cell the document was a little under 380k.

The hyperlinks are you biggest problem. I included a target declaration so the link could be opened in to a frame which is possibly something you'll want to do. You can display information about each of the cells without loosing the big table. Remove this and you remove around 280k.

I hope this makes sense, its a little late. If you have any more information or indeed if you want me to knock something up (I'll see how much free time I've got mind!) then drop me a reply.

[This message has been edited by Ian Griffiths (edited 19 June 2001).]

druddle

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by chiark:
<B>Brendan,

how much "crap" does dreamweaver chuck in for every definition? [/quote]

about 1/100 of the "cr@p" that frontpage puts in it !!!!!!!

Brendan Hughes

Ian, thanks for your reply and your offer of help. I'll file away your explanation until such time as I'm intelligent enough to read it . Seriously, as we are expecting to add another 10 countries in the next two years (I'm working for an EU agency), that could well be the long-term solution. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be able to sort it in 6 days!

Still, I think I might have found the temporary solution. PDF supports links within documents (amongst others), so I will type in the footnotes manually and create links to them. Problem is, when I update the table in Excel (at least once a month), I will have to re-do all the links.

It would be better to create the hyperlinks within Excel and keep them on conversion to PDF. And in theory, Acrobat seems to do this, but I can't get this to work (surely just Create PDF and it should be automatic?). I now have a comment up on the Acrobat forum on this. Of course, all Scoobynet contributions welcome!!

Thanks again folks - I lurve this BBS!

BJH

LanCat

ChristianR's and Ian's methods are definately the way to go, but it does depend on a)whether you are doing this internally or on the web and b)what the web server is and where it is located.
If someone does the webhosting for you it will depend on the server type and how helpful they are.
If it's internal then the database is a piece of p*ss. If it takes you more than a couple of hours I'd be surprised. Sounds like Ian already has some sample code, if not then I'm sure I have some around here.

Let us know if you need it.

Ian Griffiths

I just estimated the number if bytes per cell (ie. how many characters there would be for HTML code and data) and multiplied this by the number of cells.

As the number of bytes per cell goes up, the size of the file goes up by the same number x 10000-odd!!