Over the course of this year, I’ve been writing two posts a week and been running into various formatting/design issues, two of which I finally dealt with earlier this week. One was embedding an Excel table into a blog post and the other was creating a BCG style “growth-share” matrix.

To convert a table from Excel to HTML I would write Excel formulae that would wrap each cell in a <td> tag and then wrap each row in a <tr>tag. I’d then copy and paste the result into the text editor to add the header row and finish up the styling. To generate a growth-share matrix, I’d just use Google Drawing or Keynote to draw the axes and labels before taking a screenshot and cropping it into a square.

The solution to these was a bit of JavaScript with some help from StackOverflow. These tools are hosted on GitHub and accessible via https://dangoldin.github.io/js-tools/ and are under the MIT License. As I run into more of these I’ll keep on adding various tools to this list. If you have any suggestions or want to add your own let me know.