How to create a grid in a blog post using Excel

Wow - what a pain trying to put a grid into a blog post! After several hours of struggling I finally figured out the magic formula. (Of course there is almost certainly an easier method so feel free to post comments.)

This is what I finally came up with - 1378 easy to follow steps. :-)

1. Create your Excel spreadsheet - complete with grid lines, etc. You have to add the grid lines in Excel or they won't come through in the blog.

2. Copy all of the cells you are interested in.

3. Paste Special - HTML into MS Word. (This will appear as a grid just like you see it in Excel.)

4. Save the document as a web-page from MS Word.

5. Open the saved htm/html document in Notepad and copy all of the text.

6. Paste the text into a new MS Word document. (This will appear as the html text - not the grid you saw in Excel.)

7. VERY IMPORTANT: Choose Edit/Replace/More/Special and replace all "Paragrah Marks" and "Tab Characters" with nothing. For some reason if these characters are in the html you use for your blog post they will be rendered in the actual blog post and your grid will be 5 pages from the top of the blog and a complete mess.

8. Copy all the text to the html version of a new blog post and publish. You will almost certainly get errors which I have found you can ignore. Not sure the affect of doing that since the blog looked fine for me. It may mean that certain browsers/OS will not see the post correctly due to specifics in the html that may not be supported.

9. ALSO VERY IMPORTANT: Once the grid is published don't do anything to it such as editing, composing, etc. Once you reopen the blog the blog post editor will mess up the formating and you will be doing this all over again.

If you have any tips on how to make this process easier please share them. It would be nice if I could do this in as few steps as possible.

One final note - I had to change the formatting of my blog so that I could see all of the content of the grid. When the grid is wide some blogs will cut off the extra and won't provide scrolling or stretching capability. Play around with the different styles until you find one you like.