At some point you will need to add a table into your WordPress post or page. For instance, you want to create a comparison table or simply display the data from an Excel file or another source in a user friendly way.

Those of you that have worked with the default WordPress editor know how difficult this can be when the table gets more complicated or if you want to add some extra features like pagination, sorting, filtering or responsive behaviour. The solution for most users is to install a table plugin that will add this missing functionality with just a few clicks.

Even though there are many table plugins out there, most of them come with some serious limitations. For example, they may support very well just one feature or a group of features but not all required by your table.

They may work well with small tables, but not with large tables or text that contains special characters. They may support responsive design, but use a single design pattern that is not suitable for your particular table. You get the idea.

Tabulizer for WordPress is a new table plugin that goes beyond the basics and gives you unlimited freedom to select features, styling options, data transformations and formatting and much more.

This is done by having each table feature or styling option to corresponds to a “rule”, so by combining different rules you can create an unlimited number of table presets or templates (aka rulesets) that are tailored to your specific needs.

For instance, if you want a table to have sorting controls, pagination and be responsive all you have to do is to add one rule for pagination, another one for sorting and a third one for the responsive pattern that will be applied. Each rule can have many options and parameter for fine tuning.

You can create a table statically that can be edited and re-edited like a regular table using a text editor or a spreadsheet like editor, or dynamically by linking your table to a data source so when the source is updated the linked table gets updated as well.

The data source can be an external Excel file, a CSV/Text file, an XML file, an RSS feed, a remote table stored in another web page, a database query in a local or remote database.

You can even merge multiple data sources into a single table and if the table rows increase significantly you can activate the ajax loading feature so only the part of the table that is actually needed is loaded and not all the table data. This will dramatically reduce the loading time in large tables.

Most importantly, you can do all this without by following the steps of an online table creation wizard, without the need for coding or CSS/HTML/Javascript knowledge.

You can also export the table data as a CSV or Excel file, turn your table into an interactive graph e.g. line graph, bar graph, pie graph, etc. There are seven different graph types to choose from and it’s super easy to create a graph to table template using the online graph creation wizard.

Finally, it’s possible to apply custom PHP code to the input table data which creates interesting possibilities. For instance, there is a ruleset to turn your table into an event calendar, or another one to turn a table with image filenames into a polaroid image gallery. You can also use Tabulizer as an advanced RSS feed aggregator (add rules to remove feeds based on their title, contents, date of creation, etc).

If you want to see more demos, view the complete features list or learn more about Tabulizer, the swiss-army table plugin visit Tabulizer.com.