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is a very broad tag, which currently has no tag wiki and encompasses everything from questions about Excel, SQL tables, tables in Microsoft Word, and a whole host of other things. In other words, it doesn't represent a single area of expertise.

I feel that the MS Word ones could possibly be split into a tag, as that is a specific function set under Word that people do have specific problems with formatting, etc. But the rest of the questions I feel don't actually need the tag at all, and it could be removed outright.

Thoughts?

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    The tag is quite meaningless; I'd just remove it altogether.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented Jul 21, 2014 at 6:11
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    @slhck - sure, it was only a suggestion to split out the ms word tables :-)
    – Robotnik
    Commented Jul 21, 2014 at 6:40
  • It might be worth having an excel-tables tag as well, since the syntax for referring to data in Excel tables is different than regular range references. I haven't looked through the tagged questions to see if the tag is used for that, but there are conceivably some issues that relate specifically to this.
    – Excellll
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 2:48
  • Upon review, most of the questions tagged with tables and microsoft-excel are not about Excel tables in the technical sense. If used properly, the excel-tables tag would be pretty sparse. Worse yet, the questions here suggest the tag would be misapplied pretty often.
    – Excellll
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 2:53
  • @Excellll - Yeah I'd advise against [excel-tables]. It all comes down to fields of expertise. From a layman's point of view, Excel is software that deals with tables as its core function - so simply tagging with [microsoft-excel] should be enough if your question is about creating/modifying tables. Other largish subsections of the application, such as Macros, may require specialist knowledge that isn't relevant to the layman, or even necessary to use excel competently 80% of the time. Thus, having a [microsoft-excel-macros] subtag may be a good option, as it's a specific field of expertise.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 5:13
  • I should also mention that I've seen it also used as a typo tag for tablet.
    – gparyani
    Commented Sep 19, 2014 at 22:10

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I agree that is overly broad and meaningless by itself.

I will make a case for as a new tag to rise from its burninated ashes, though.

As prosaic as the name sounds, tables are actually a useful feature of Excel, not just another way of referring to any data in an Excel sheet. Looking through the questions tagged with and , a handful pertain to use of this feature. There are still several others with these tags (the majority) that have nothing to do with this feature.

So, if is created, it will likely be misapplied fairly often. However, with a well-crafted tag wiki excerpt and tag wiki, some of this can be avoided.

So, I say yes to creating and offer to help curate the tag (cull the questions that don't belong) and write a tag wiki for it if/when it is created.

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    You're forgetting one thing: When tags aren't applied correctly, it's because people don't read the manual.
    – Doktoro Reichard
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 14:20
  • @DoktoroReichard I'm not claiming that the tag wiki excerpt will eliminate all misuse of the tag, but it will eliminate some, hopefully enough to make the tag useful for classification.
    – Excellll
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 14:32
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    @Excellll Not really. The tag cd is well-documented to mean the cd command, but many users misuse it for the optical media (i.e. the tag compact-disc).
    – gparyani
    Commented Aug 10, 2014 at 18:31
  • @damryfbfnetsi Speaking of which, I've re tagged all incorrect questions :) At least they're still being reviewed.
    – QuyNguyen2013
    Commented Dec 3, 2014 at 2:16
  • @gparyani There is a cd command tag? Wow. The vast majority of them have 0 upvotes, several have negative votes, and one FAQ about windows drive letters has a lot. Seems the whole tag exists solely to tell people to use cd /D in windows console.
    – doug65536
    Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 18:50

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