My apologies for the previous post, I was experimenting with copying a table into the forum and apparently hit the GO button without intending to.
No problem. It's an interesting question. I don't have a good answer.
Since I have raised the issue anyway, is there a way to copy a table (such as Excel or Word) into a post. As you can see from my previous post, what comes across is without much in the way of format.
The best thing to do would be to save the table as HTML. If you look at my post above, it shows that the syntax for the Forum is practically identical to HTML, except for the kind of brackets used to encase tags:
<table></table> vs. [table][/table]
<tr></tr> vs. [tr][/tr]
<td></td> vs. [td][/td]
What I mean by "look at my post above" is "click on the quote button in my post to see the source code."
So, once you get your table into HTML, simply search and replace to change the angle brackets. Then it should drop into a post without too much difficulty.
I'm not seeing a way to format the table with borders. That may require hacking the .css for the Forum. Before I go that route, I'll do a little more searching for a simpler solution.
UPDATE #1: Search complete. Tables inside of posts do not have a special class already picked out in the .css. I might be able to define the default table tag with borders--although I'm afraid that it might have ill effects on all of the tables used in the layout of the Forum. If you see strange things happening here, blame BobS.
UPDATE #2: I've modified the code to give tables a collapsed, 1-pixel, gray border. It worked to make the test table inside your post more legible but, as I feared, it added a lot of extra lines to the layout tables. It might be possible to create a special .css class for the layout tables and then hack the php code for the forum so that the layout class has no borders but all other tables do. I'm not gonna play with that tonight. I've caused enough trouble for today.
UPDATE #3: I've hacked away at the php for displaying posts and gotten rid of a lot of the extraneous borders that I introduced by modifying the .css. I have signed all of my edits so if there is a huge storm of protest from users, we can revert to the old configuration--with no borders for tables in posts.