How-to create a forrest table in Excel
Create your table in Excel

Follow these steps to create a new table in Excel:

  1. Set the document title in File→Properties...
  2. Set the sheet's title as section title; Put each table in a separate sheet
  3. Create a table header in the first row
  4. Insert your content into the table
  5. Put spaces into empty cells
  6. Set the output format to XML: File→Save as..., then select File type XML
  7. Choose a filename that ends in -table.xml and save

You may open the XML file directly with Excel afterwards.

See the Simple Table as an example.

Include your table in forrest

Follow these steps to include a new table in your project:

  1. In your forrest.properties file: Include org.apache.forrest.plugin.excel in project.required.plugins
  2. Include the file in your site.xml as usual: <mytable label="My Table" href="my-table.xml"/>
The plugin will treat all files ending in -table.xml as Excel-XML files.
Options
Including figures

If you want to include a figure above your table, put the keyword figure into the first column and the path into the second column (relative to images). You may include a caption in the fourth (4th) column. See the Table with figure as an example.

Descriptive Text

If you want to include a descriptive text for a section, put the keyword text into the first column and the text itself into the second column. You may include more than one paragraph.

Coloring cells

For a color table you may specify the background color for single cells: put the color's hex-triplet (e.g. #FFD0AA) into the cell. Make sure this is the only content. See the Color Table as an example.