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You can def. use footnotes within the tables. That was a game-changer for my doctoral thesis. And my copy-editor, being used to MS Word but graciously willing to install and work with Mellel on my manuscript, was jolly well astonished when I told her I didn't need to use table-notes made manually!

Et cetera wrote: ↑Fri Jul 27, 2018 6:43 pmFor me, table "breaks" (automatic at the bottom of a page, but with the ability to input manual breaks) with defined headings that would carry over to the next page are also important for those who translate or provide multi-lingual columnar data.

I don't understand. Being a translator myself, I know there is no natural law that requires that you use tables when translating text from one language to another.
It would be very helpful if you could upload a screenshot.

Tables can be very convenient with translations, particularly in my case: Hebrew/English.
-- Hebrew is right-to-left and tends to be very terse.
-- English is left-to-right and wordy.
I can make the English column wider than the Hebrew one.
Also, if the Hebrew has NIKUD (vowel marks), I usually set line spacing to 1.5 while the English can remain at 1.0

You can see how easy this all is with tables
and
I can give each verse or section its own cell which makes positioning on the page a no-brainer.

I have no need for Et cetera's table headings, but i can see how they could be useful.

Janet

To add to the great suggestions above:
- tables should flow naturally between pages, splitting cells to prevent text being clipped off (as per Et cetera's suggestion of automatic page breaks)
- column headers should be (optionally) carried over to the next page for multi-page tables.

My own priorities in descending order:

1. Getting the navigation shortcuts in line with prevailing practice in other apps.
2. Ability to insert new rows and/or columns and remove old ones anywhere within the structure of an existing table.
3. Some provision to designate special rows and/or columns at the edges of a table as heading rows or heading columns, to give them their own formatting and padding and to allow automatic repetition of headings when a table straddles multiple pages.
4. The ability to locate and size an image within a table cell using controls that mimic the existing ones for locating and sizing an image on a page.
5. Right now it is pretty easy for captions to become separated from tables or figures they are meant to label. We can move the label without moving the labeled item (or vice versa), and the two can easily end up separated by a page break. Ideally one wants captions to be firmly bound to the items they label. One wants them to retain their current status as auto-titles with determinate sequential position in the main text of the document. And one wants to allow the user complete control over their formatting and placement. Doing all three of these things at once would require some pretty delicate design choices.
In the meantime, it might help to have an Attach or Pair command that could link a caption to the item it labels (a table, an image, perhaps a text box) in such a way that
(a) the caption and what it labels would never be separated by a page or column break;
(b) deleting, copying, or moving the entire labeled item would delete, copy, or move its label as well, unless the user overrides this behavior;
(c) one could nevertheless select the caption without the labeled item or the labeled item without the caption, for reformatting purposes.
6. Further down the road, it would be nice to be able to place tables and wrap text around them as one can already do with text boxes. That too might involve delicate design choices. (Where does the text in such a table belong in the overall structure of the document for navigation purposes and for search and replace?)

Auto-fill and the calculation of sums or averages aren’t important to me personally, but needs and expectations obviously vary. There might be issues concerning what should happen to auto-filled text if rows or columns are subsequently added or deleted.

Call me a heretic but tables is about the only feature that other wordprocessor from MACROHARD does right. Pilage and plunder what they do and I will be happy. I actually used Indesign tables in my PhD thesis that I copied as images into mellel.

My six penn'orth:

1 - Enable Auto-titles within table cells. I put several tables in my thesis to hold images in place, then found I couldn't use the A-Ts to number them sequentially within a chapter.

2 - enable a repeat header for each page function. I have several quite complex tables in my Appendices which would benefit from that.

And if you can do those two things within the next three weeks before I submit the book MS, that would be great...!!! Though I quite understand if that's not possible, and I'm sure you have other priorities.

It's a great program. Now I need to post about page margins...

Another table problem. If one selects the table's text and equalizes the columns, the result may have rows with highly varied gaps at the bottom. One must then move each row upward manually. Shouldn't the default set the row height to be what is necessary to show all text in the row's deepest cell?