Re: [office] Re: [office-accessibility] Re: [office] Fw:[office-accessibility] Inclusion of tables

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

On Feb 24, 2006, at 7:21 AM, Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote:
> > Tables should behave as if they were part of the slide.

Bruce D'Arcus replied:
> Yes!
> 
> Re: the Keynote question earlier, no, it doesn't use ODF, but I was 
> responding to the notion that tables are not a standard feature of 
> presentation applications generally.

Let me confirm that.  Two days ago I was editing a set of slides
where one of the MOST IMPORTANT slides in the presentation was
a traditional table (a 3-column table, with a heading row and rows of
data underneath it).  Tables are valuable in presentations for the
same reason that they are valuable in documents -- for some
information, a table is the clearest way to present it.
Tables are great when you have structured data.

In OpenOffice.org 2, it's easy to get a table embedded in
a presentation.  Just go to the "layouts" list, and
click on the "spreadsheet" icon to make the
main body of the slide a spreadsheet (which then becomes
an embedded object).  Then you can edit away.  By default
the borders don't show, but that is trivially fixed
(format->cells->borders).

If there's a better method to support tables in presentations,
PARTICULARLY if there's a better way to improve
accessibility, then that's great--sounds like a worthy thing
to discuss. And if this is an OpenOffice.org 2-unique extension,
it sounds like something that needs standardizing (I suspect
it's NOT unique... I suspect it's just using ordinary embedding).

But I _do_ want to remove any misunderstandings:
1. Yes, it IS important to support tables inside presentations.
2. Yes, there's at least one ODF-compliant application that
    DOES support tables inside presentations (OpenOffice.org 2);
    maybe people want a "better" approach, but you CAN do it today.

--- David A. Wheeler