My users find tables in dokuwiki very hard to manage. A comma seperated table is **much** easier to work with. I installed this plugin
http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:csv. To me it is much better thant the normal table setup for dokuwiki and I would suggest that it become the default way to handle tables. Csv format is very common and easy to understand and generate from external programs. It is also much easier to type a table using the csv format. All that is missing from the csv table setup is the ability of having dokuwiki links work inside the table and formatting available. I think this would be a **big** improvement to the table syntax for dokuwiki. Maybe it would be easy to have both formats available? The csv plugin even lets you link to a file.
CSV Format:
<csv>
Heading 1 , Heading 2 , Heading 3 ,
Row 1 Col 1 , Row 1 Col 2 , Row 1 Col 3 ,
Row 2 Col 1 , some colspan (note the double pipe) ,,
Row 3 Col 1 , Row 2 Col 2 , Row 2 Col 3 ,
</csv>
vs
Dokuwiki Format:
^ Heading 1 ^ Heading 2 ^ Heading 3 ^
| Row 1 Col 1 | Row 1 Col 2 | Row 1 Col 3 |
| Row 2 Col 1 | some colspan (note the double pipe) ||
| Row 3 Col 1 | Row 2 Col 2 | Row 2 Col 3 |