Copytables :: Help

Quick start

Control-click (or right-click) a table on a web page
In the context menu, choose Copy table and paste the table into your document
Or choose Download table and open the file in your spreadsheet application
For everything else, click the Copytables button in the Safari toolbar

Copytables works with actual HTML tables. Pages that only look tabular, and online spreadsheets, are not supported.

Selecting parts of a table

If you don't need the whole table, select the part you want with the mouse and copy or download just that part.

Press and hold command ⌘ and click to select single cells:

Name	First name	Born	Birthplace	Age
Shakespeare	William	1564	Stratford	52
Defoe	Daniel	1660	London	71
Swift	Jonathan	1667	Dublin	77
Blake	William	1757	London	69
Austen	Jane	1775	Steventon	41
Dickens	Charles	1812	Portsmouth	58
Orwell	George	1903	Motihari	46

Press and hold command ⌘ and drag to select rectangular areas:

Name	First name	Born	Birthplace	Age
Shakespeare	William	1564	Stratford	52
Defoe	Daniel	1660	London	71
Swift	Jonathan	1667	Dublin	77
Blake	William	1757	London	69
Austen	Jane	1775	Steventon	41
Dickens	Charles	1812	Portsmouth	58
Orwell	George	1903	Motihari	46

Press and hold option ⌥ and click or drag to select columns:

Name	First name	Born	Birthplace	Age
Shakespeare	William	1564	Stratford	52
Defoe	Daniel	1660	London	71
Swift	Jonathan	1667	Dublin	77
Blake	William	1757	London	69
Austen	Jane	1775	Steventon	41
Dickens	Charles	1812	Portsmouth	58
Orwell	George	1903	Motihari	46

Press and hold both command ⌘ and option ⌥ and click or drag to select rows:

Name	First name	Born	Birthplace	Age
Shakespeare	William	1564	Stratford	52
Defoe	Daniel	1660	London	71
Swift	Jonathan	1667	Dublin	77
Blake	William	1757	London	69
Austen	Jane	1775	Steventon	41
Dickens	Charles	1812	Portsmouth	58
Orwell	George	1903	Motihari	46

Hold shift ⇧ in addition to extend the current selection, or shift ⇧ alone to extend it to the cell you click.

Selections add up — every click or drag joins what is already selected. Click a selected cell again with the same keys to take it back out: select a column with option ⌥, then command ⌘-click its header, and only that one cell is dropped.

The keys for cells, columns and rows are configured in Modifier keys

Finding tables

Find tables scrolls the page to the first, previous, next or last table, and selects it, so you can copy it without touching the mouse.

Capture mode

In the capture mode you select with a plain click or drag, without holding any keys.

Turn it on in Capture mode and choose what a click selects — cells, columns, rows or whole tables. The mode ends after you copy, unless Keep active is on.

Every capture mode can also be turned on and off with a keyboard shortcut, see below.

Copying in different formats

Copy as… has a button for every format. A click copies the selection, or the whole table if nothing is selected, in that format:

Table — The plain table, without any formatting
Table (styled) — The table as it looks on the screen, with all colors and fonts
Markdown — A nicely aligned table for Markdown and text documents
CSV — Comma-separated values, for spreadsheet applications
CSV+Swap — Comma-separated values, with columns and rows swapped
TSV — Tab-delimited text
HTML — The HTML source of the table, without formatting
HTML+CSS — The HTML source of the table, with the formatting retained
JSON — The cells as a JSON array of rows

The Default format at the bottom of the panel is the one used by Copy table in the page context menu and by the copy shortcut.

Downloading in different formats

Download as… saves the selection, or the whole table if nothing is selected, as a file instead of copying it:

Excel — An .xlsx workbook with plain cells
Excel (styled) — An .xlsx workbook that keeps the colors, fonts and borders of the page
Markdown — A nicely aligned table for Markdown and text documents
CSV — Comma-separated values, for spreadsheet applications
CSV+Swap — Comma-separated values, with columns and rows swapped
TSV — Tab-delimited text
HTML — The HTML source of the table, without formatting
HTML+CSS — The HTML source of the table, with the formatting retained
JSON — The cells as a JSON array of rows

The Default format here is the one used by Download table in the page context menu and by the download shortcut.

Keyboard shortcuts

Copytables comes with no shortcuts assigned. To set one up, open Keyboard shortcuts , click the button next to an action and press the keys you want to use.

Copy and Download — copy or download the selection in the default format
Capture off, Capture cells, Capture columns, Capture rows, Capture tables — switch the capture mode
Find first table, Find previous table, Find next table, Find last table — jump between the tables on the page

Numbers

Copytables reads the numbers in the selected cells to fill the infobox and to write real numbers into spreadsheet files.

If a page uses a number format that does not match your system settings, set the decimal point and the thousands separator in Number format

Infobox

The infobox displays how many numbers are selected, together with their sum, average, minimum and maximum.

In Infobox you can turn it off, move it to any corner of the window, and keep it on screen until you close it.