Sometimes, you get an order from a client a “simple requires” which can take you either a lot of time or or you have an idea how to do it quickly and well. Surely, you know that your client loves tables, since they do it in Excel, they want to have them on the Joomla web site, preferably in such form as they have in Calc program.
The easiest method is, of course, dropping a file (spreadsheet) as an addendum to the article, however, about the disadvantages of this solution does not need no convincing. Another option is to paste the table, but to obtain the effect of sorting the columns according to specific criteria, you need to use an additional extension (javascript library).
- ARI Data Tables (www.ari-soft.com)- is a commercial module which converts HTML tables into powerful and functional tables with possibilities to sort, filter and paging data. It can also create different charts based on data from tables. The extension can load data from SQL databases and CSV files.
- Art Table (www.artetics.com) – is also a commercial module that shows sortable, filterable, customizable tables from SQL query, CSV file, HTML table. Charts can be shown as well. It can also display line, area, bar, column, pie charts from HTML table, CSV file or database. Charts are cross-browse and can be displayed in IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc.
- Szaki Table (szathmari.hu) – is a free plugin that shows sortable, filterable, expandable, customizable tables and filter lists. Since v0.3 it has functionality to show external CSV to table.
Most of these solutions using a DataTables script (www.datatables.net) based on jQuery which has a highly configurable access to HTML tables with advanced access features. DataTables is released with dual licensing, using the GPL v2 and an BSD style license.
All these extensions have versions adapted to work with the latest release of Joomla! 1.6.