Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Meta

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Post History

75%
+4 −0
Meta Best practices for posting tabular data

I am trying to find how tabular data is presented in Software Development. So far, I have found one question, How to pivot text?. The question presents tabular data using code blocks, dash to indic...

3 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by Wicket‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Wicket‭

#1: Initial revision by user avatar Wicket‭ · 2023-06-22T20:15:47Z (over 1 year ago)
Best practices for posting tabular data
I am trying to find how tabular data is presented in Software Development. So far, I have found one question, [How to pivot text?](https://software.codidact.com/posts/278621). The question presents tabular data using code blocks, dash to indicate a new row, pipe to indicate column separation and underscore to indicate an empty cell. I took the data from the referred question and set none as the programming language to prevent the text from being highlighted:

```none
- PERSON 1 | PERSON 2 | YES
- PERSON 1 | PERSON 3 | YES
- PERSON 2 | PERSON 1 | YES
- PERSON 2 | PERSON 3 | YES
- PERSON 3 | PERSON 1 | NO
- PERSON 3 | PERSON 2 | NO
```

and
```none
- _________| PERSON 1 | PERSON 2 | PERSON 3 |
- PERSON 1 |   X      |   YES    |    YES   |
- PERSON 2 |   YES    |   X      |    YES   |
- PERSON 3 |   NO     |   NO     |    X     |
```

Sometimes, including the column and row headers on `spreadsheet-formula` questions might be relevant. Below I'm using dashes (-) and a plus (+) character between columns to separate the column headers from the data below:

```none
  |    A     |    B     |  C
--+----------+----------+-----
1 | PERSON 1 | PERSON 2 | YES
2 | PERSON 1 | PERSON 3 | YES
3 | PERSON 2 | PERSON 1 | YES
4 | PERSON 2 | PERSON 3 | YES
5 | PERSON 3 | PERSON 1 | NO
6 | PERSON 3 | PERSON 2 | NO
```

It bugs me a bit that the space between lines looks to be too big. 

- Is there a better way to present tabular data?  
- Is there a way to reduce the space between lines?