Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Importing HTML table into numbers?

I'm researching video cameras to buy one for Christmas. One of the requirements is support for iLife, and in particular, iMovie.

So I googled to see if I could find a compatibility list, and sure enough, we have technical article 306171.

The next step was filtering the table for HDD-based cameras. I copied the HTML table, fire up Numbers, and pasted it, and... WTF?? A single column of data? I fired up Excel and sure enough, pasting a HTML table produces a decent Excel worksheet, one that I can then AutoFilter and work with.

So unless I'm missing something obvious (not unheard of), Numbers just ignores the largest source of tabular data available, the Web.

Really smart...

Anybody has a quick AppleScript to import HTML tables?

Update: well, not a AppleScript, but Firefox. If you copy the table in Firefox and paste inside Numbers it will just work! Many many thanks to Jon Prettyman (via comments).