Hi,
thanks for your question, and sorry for the trouble.
Using blank lines in a CSV file is not possible, unfortunately, as that’s against the standard that TablePress tries to follow for CSV (There’s no fixed CSV standard, but some common agreements that many people follow, and that says that all lines need to contain content — or at least the necessary amount of CSV delimiters — unless the empy line is encoded properly (with quotation marks)).
Using the tab as a delimiter is usually not a problem, but with most text editors, there’s something to keep in mind: Some of them will clean all trailing whitespace from the end of each line — which is going to cause trouble, for example if your last column is empty.
Thus, I’d actually like to suggest to not use the tab as a delimiter in your specific case (as you have such empty last columns). Instead, use e.g. the comma or semicolon, so that you’d have
1978;
President;William L. “Bill” Smith, Somerville, TN
Vice President;
Secretary-Treasurer;Pat Smith, Austin, TX
Historian;Gayle H. Smith, Somerville, TN
;
1979;
;
1980-1982;
President;William L. “Bill” Smith, Somerville, TN
Vice President;Jack Brown, Memphis, TN
Secretary-Treasurer;Pat Smith, Austin, TX
As you can, see each line contains exactly one ; as the table has two columns. This is a requirement that would be hard to meet (for the issues with text editors mentioned above) with the tab.
The .txt is actually not a program for TablePress. What error message are you getting? (Note that you must still choose “CSV” after selecting a .txt file for upload.)
Regards,
Tobias
