By Jin Nan Goto

One of the Great advantages Mozilla Firefox has are all the plug-ins and extensions.  Firefox extensions and plug-ins can greatly enhance its abilities. TableTools is a nice gem that solves a big problem with HTML tables.  It is difficult to extract the table from the webpage without breaking the table.  If you cut and paste a table into Mircosoft Excel, the table will all be stuffed within a single cell.  Moving tables from the web to a spreadsheet application is a very time consuming process.

TableTools is a Firefox Extension that gives you greater abilities to manipulate data stored in tables on the Web.  Currently in version 0.26, You can sort and run filters on the data from within the browser.  While the filters and sorting abilities by themselves can be useful, What Is really great about TableTools is that it lets you quickly and easily copy tables from the web into your favorite spreadsheet application.  Simply copy the contents of the table as tab-delimited text (right click anywhere on the table and select “copy as Tab-delimited” from the menu item “Other table operations”) and then you can paste the copied data into a spreadsheet for use offline.  You can get TableTools at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2637