#1

I know this probably breaks markdown compatibility but never the less…

Often it’s very powerful to be able to use a bit more advanced tables to structure and display more complex information.
Markdown tables are very limited and not suitable for not very simple content that requires advanced formatting such as line breaks, checkboxes and so on.

A more capable table plugin would be highly appreciated in order to also capture advanced content with obsidian.

A confluence like table capability would be very powerful.

24 Likes
Create complex tabels in Obsidian
Table Editor
Live Preview: Add Support for tables (Render Tables as per "reading" view)
#2

It would indeed break Markdown and the document would no longer be available for edits in other Markdown apps.

Looks like we are entering HTML editing, so you could actually do any html coding in any markdown document, not sure how various Markdown editors handle the layout, though.

#3

There’s some quite complex tables shown in Roam on Twitter. Uses markdown, maybe CSS and ???
But I’d be concerned about breaking the ability of other programs to read the files.
Embed or link?

3 Likes
#4

Embedding is probably the way to go to have it included into the document while not breaking markdown compatibility of the remaining content. Good thought :bulb:

2 Likes
#5

I think this is definitely a possibility if the plugin API allows custom views beyond markdown. I created this post - https://forum.obsidian.md/t/custom-views/449

I think there’s interest in a variety of note views: tables, kanban boards, mind maps, calendars, etc.

4 Likes
#6

Isn’t regular HTML part of markdown? With custom CSS you actually can make a lot of customisation in obsidian document already. The only problem I ran into already is that wikilinks are not supported inside HTML tags.

#7

is there a way of making markdown tables sortable? I mean simple asc/desc sorting by clicking on the column header. would be a nice extra to have when working with tables

1 Like
#8

Markdown tables can have no dynamic features, they output static html.

1 Like
#9

Maybe create a plugin that take a markdown table, convert it to JSON, sort it and then rewrite it in markdown?

#10

thanks, tim. unfortunately, I have zero programming skills. but if someone would create such a plugin, i would be thankful forever : )

#11

thanks, sam!

#12

I started something. We’ll see if I can do something interesting :slight_smile:

#13

Good News! I’ve written a plugin that allows MultiMarkdown table syntax to work in Obsidian, go to Github for more details: alx-plugins/table-extended

5 Likes
#14

Looks very interesting. Thanks for making this!

A shame that it has to be in a code block for now.

I wonder if this is something that will change as the API grows and matures?

#15

Easy creation of tables on the fly and the ability to have multiple lines in a cell is one of the best features of OneNote. It’s a low friction way to lay something out, to start to analyse a topic. Obviously tables could be much better (in OneNote) but I would love to have just that kind of functionality in Obsidian. I know markdown is possibly the constraining factor, but I hope there’s a way to get something going … maybe something like the kanban plugin, but with a way to layout horizontal swimlanes as well?

1 Like
#16

New version of Table Extended: experimental support for extended native table syntax, no more code blocks/indicators required :tada:

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