Comments on: 10 tips for producing nice, maintainable tables in Lotus Notes

By: Robin K Mullins

Robin K Mullins — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:35:33 +0000

I’m using a lot of tables in a fairly straight forward manner. Basically what I’m creating is an outline with proper indenting of each subsection. It shows up perfect in a browser but the client is something else again. The tables are Fit With Margins. I’m merging a lot of cells so as to create the indent effect. When I open a doc in the client the margin’s left margin might be anywhere from 2 to 6 inches to the right. By opening the table’s property box, dropping down the Table Width, and clicking on Fit With Margins (which is where it already it) the table rights itself and returns to its normal size. Pain in the @$$ to have to fix it every time I open a doc with a table in it.

By: Martin Vereecken

Martin Vereecken — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:38:12 +0000

Great sample of the “Deutsche Gründlichkeit” ;-). I experienced the same problem with changing table widths and merged cells. Whenever possible, I don’t merge them unless absolutely necessary (f.e. when I merge cells for a title row, but the title text is small, I just remove the right border of the first cell).

I noticed that column widths sometimes depend on fieldwidth, but I didn’t realize it had to do with absolute margins. Good to know!

By: Thomas Bahn

Thomas Bahn — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 10:15:34 +0000

Hi Martin,

I’m using fixed size tables with a combined with of 17,5 cm everywhere in my form. The “normal” table has always 4 columns:
4,2 cm for labels
1,0 cm for icons, like “Select person” (centered)
0,6 cm for an icon flagging mandatory fields (centered)
11,7 cm for the fields

And certainly, I have a copy of an empty table in a subform (rule 10).

But I have some big issues with the first rule. Whenever I set the column spacing > 0 and merge cells (in a row), the table gets smaller every time I save the form?!? Unfortunately I cannot place an image here, but believe me, its happening.

If you use Absolute (left) text margins, the column cannot set smaller then the smallest field in it. This is normally no problem, but in some tables I want to have a “matrix” of fields.

Relative text margins make it hard to get a straight vertical line, when there are merged cells in some rows…

Therefore I got into the habit to enter exactly one space in each table cell. But this is bad for fields with content longer than one line…

It’s still an open problem for me.

By: martin.vereecken

martin.vereecken — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:03:54 +0000

Thank you for the extra tip 9bis, didn’t really notice this was a problem.
I know that hiding lines in a table can be tricky, because the table takes the initial (visible) height and if you show a line of text extra, because of changed values, the dialog doesn’t resize, so part of the layout can fall out of the dialogbox.

By: Fabian Robok

Fabian Robok — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:03:52 +0000

And if you are following tip no. 9, make especially sure to follow tip no. 2 as well. [SizeToTable] doesn’t play nicely with line height settings other then 1. It could be considered a bug, but since rule no. 2 should be obeyed anyway, … who cares?