Best way to write tables

Authoring Inform 7
1

Well, I’ve moved on to getting my hands dirty in I7 with tables. Problem is – they are clunky to write in the editor, for me, especially with conversation choices, where there are many lines of code. Does anyone out there know an easy way to lay out tables with say, 4 columns and 8 rows, where there would be varying lengths to the text in each column? For an easy example, if I have 4 lines of conversation, I tab over, then I have two lines, then 8, then I want to create a new row, how can this be done without painstakingly adding carriage returns to make the tables fit into these tab delineated rows? Is there a way to drop a table in, or has anyone used Excel or another tool to create tables easily?

Thanks for any help in advance!

2

Yes, Excel (or any other tool like that) is very helpful for making I7 tables.

I think someone here was working on a prototype GUI conversation builder at some point? Something like that also could work if the output could transpile to I7. Here it was, https://intfiction.org/t/any-interest-in-an-inform-7-conversation-tree-creation-tool/5181/1 .

I experimented once with embedding a spreadsheet in the I7 GUI (possible because the docs are html). It was kind of neat but I’m not sure you gain anything over just having the spreadsheet in a separate application.