I am a recent user of Web Designer 10 Premium having done some web design on the side for a very long time. As background, I have been a holdout for hand-generated and hand-edited HTML until recently when I gave up and researched tools like Xara's Web Designer. I have a technical and programming background, but am interested in graphic design too. I looked at a number of competing web development tools.

First, I have to say is great job! Wow. Web Designer Premium is an outstanding piece of quality software and great tool. My drive was to give up hand-edited HTML so I could be effective at responsive design. Xara has done it when a number of other tools have not and is very stable when other tools are riddled with bugs. It's cleart this software has a strong graphics design and layout slant and that Xara's tools have that bias too. That's fine, but it leads me to the one question and potential suggestion I have so far...

The lack of some sort of tables support in Web Designer Premium seems like a significant shortcoming. I hope I have missed something here, and can get advice where to look.

I have tried a number of things:
  • Pasting copied table from another app -- results into a nice conversion of text objects and colored rectangles. This doesn't adjust well as it is all separate graphic/text elements.
  • Found the table widget -- this is CSV data that must be imported, which is really hard to work with in the editor. An external editor of some sort must be used.
  • Pasting an HTML Placeholder -- This creates the best rendition of a table, but requires it come from another application where you can have a GUI or WYSIWIG editing, but can access the HTML generated and past it as a placeholder. It cannot be edited in Web Designer Premium

I think an easy-to-edit "table of some sort" within Web Designer would be a great addition, if it is not there now. Tables are an essential element of organizing and manipulating information that cannot be quickly, efficiently, or easily handled by a graphics-element-only interface or set of tools. I don't care (usually) if the final resulting code within a web page is not a table, but some sort of table object within Web Designer would be an outstanding addition. The only time I would care about an object on a site acting like a table is if there were needs for live re-flow of content upon re-sizing or live re-sorting needs. Please consider adding something to this great software if it is not there already.

If there is a good solution for editing tabular data in Web Designer Premium, can someone explain how to do it?

Thanks!