I can’t add or edit text in certain cells of my tables
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So, I am trying to edit some tables on my website. I can add new columns, and I can edit the text of the top row of the new column, but the row below it won’t let me interact with it at all. It just selects the entire table rather than the cell I’m trying to edit and the text editor doesn’t pop up at all. I’ve tried different browsers, clearing the cache, making sure everything is up to date, but still nothing lets me interact with those cells. I don’t have any special themes or plugins and I’m purely using the WordPress editor. It’s all very bare bones.
I can edit them in HTML mode but I am very much a layman and no good with HTML. I need the visual editor to do things. Please help me figure out what’s going on and what I can do to fix it. My site is literally 90% tables.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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It sounds like the Block Editor is experiencing a ‘selection wrap’ glitch where it can’t distinguish between a specific cell and the entire table container. Since you’ve already cleared your cache and tried other browsers, the best way to bypass this without learning HTML is to use the List View tool. Click the ‘three-line’ icon (it looks like a small staircase) in the top toolbar of your editor; this opens a sidebar showing the exact structure of your table. From there, you can click directly on the specific ‘Table Cell’ you want to edit, which should force the visual cursor to appear inside that cell. If that fails, try using the ‘Edit Table’ button in the block toolbar to ‘Fixed width table cells’ and see if that resets the interaction. If the problem persists, it may be a bug with the specific Table Block, and you might find the ‘Layout Grid’ or a dedicated ‘TablePress’ plugin much more stable for a site that relies so heavily on data formatting.
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First of all, I’d like to thank you for responding.
Unfortunately, I’ve already tried the list view tool, it still selects the entire table and doesn’t let me edit or select specific cells, unless there’s something I’m missing. I’ve even made a new table block and it worked for all of about a minute before I ran into the same issue of not being able to select specific cells again. I’ve also already tried the fixed table widths thing and it did nothing, unfortunately. I did try all of these again though, but still no luck.
I’ll try to see if I can find a plugin that helps.
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If even the List View and new table blocks are failing, your site likely has a ‘CSS overlay’ glitch where an invisible layer of the theme is sitting on top of the editor’s workspace, preventing your mouse clicks from reaching the individual cells. Since you are on a bare-bones setup, try this quick workaround: inside the editor, click on the Table block, and in the right-hand settings sidebar under ‘Advanced,’ look for the ‘Additional CSS Class(es)’ box and type in the word manual-edit. If that doesn’t reset it, the issue is likely a bug in the current version of the WordPress ‘Gutenberg’ editor interface itself. Since your site is 90% tables, I strongly recommend installing the TablePress plugin; it moves the table editing into a separate, spreadsheet-like interface that is much more stable and avoids the ‘visual selection’ bugs that the standard block editor is currently giving you.
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At this point, I think it’s just a bug in the current version of the editor, as this fix didn’t seem to work either. Unfortunately, as much as I’d like to, I can’t really pay for a plan upgrade or the necessary plugins, but I’ve found at least a temporary workaround by way of switching from visual editor to code editor back to visual editor. Trying that wasn’t working earlier, but it is now, even if I have to do it every time I edit a different table. It’s inconvenient, but I was able to edit what I needed to for the time being.
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