Live Preview: Support editing a table cell by cell

[raisabelatrix]

For reference, see also how Typora implemented their live-preview table editing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tm9WALReNd00wd7ECRgLTkT2AITSakkI/view?usp=sharing

[damywise]

Obsidian is now 1.0.
No updates on this?

[lumenwrites]

Use case or problem

I want to be able to edit tables in WYSIWYG mode, kind of like in google docs, without having to deal with markdown table formatting, which is very inconvenient.

Proposed solution

It would be great if the WYSIWYG mode worked for the tables. Or maybe it could be a plugin, a separate mode for viewing obsidian docs. Which allows you to edit them as tables - add rows and columns, conveniently type into cells. If the plugins like kanban are possible, then this ought to be possible too.

[sjConsumer]

Numbered Lists in a table cell are difficult: it requires using clunky html tags. This would be my vote for the first feature to implement for table formatting.

[ExistentialSunday]

I hope this gets some love soon.

[helloMars]

Look at how mark text does it (: https://imgur.com/a/CaFvIZK
GitHub - marktext/marktext: 📝A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows.

[GLight]

Just to make sure in the first place. Fundamentally, the markdown table still not supports having multiple rows of text in one cell, right?

[obsequious]

For multiple rows in of text in one cell, I use GitHub - aidenlx/table-extended: Extend basic table in Obsidian with MultiMarkdown table syntax

[GLight]

thank you.

I just tried that plug-in. It works in the read mode. However, it seems that it does not support the preview mode.

But thank you all the same.

[helloMars]

not sure if the following should be new topic, I’m just sharing ideas related to GUI table editors.
This website has the ability to sort and import and export tables of different types maybe some if this functionality can be added to obsidian.

Convert Markdown Table to Excel - Table Convert Online

[helloMars]

Thanks for the suggestion (: even though a lot of use can work there way around text based formatting - i think that there is good use in having a classic GUI altrerntive/option for making and editing tables.

[dae]

So many innovative and polished features for Obsidian 1.0 and 1.1. But Obsidian is still miles behind when it comes to editing tables.

The devs have done a beautiful job of rendering tables for display. It would be so amazing to have live-preview editing for tables as well.

Typora, MarkText, etc. make table editing a seamless experience. But tables with large images or long text are all but impossible to edit in Obsidian. I have to open Obsidian notes in Typora/MarkText/SublimeText to make simple edits.

I’d really love to see this feature on the roadmap. Obsidian needs a WYSIWYG editor that works on a cell-by-cell basis.

[MAB941009]

+1! I think the fact that Advanced Tables is the most downloaded plugin in Obsidian will serve as a reminder that markdown tables eventually will need a V2. Let’s hope that V2 includes a GUI for editing.

[pookeyblow]

+1

This is so needed! I was trying to make a simple table with sorting and while the Advanced Tables plugin works, I really need a wysiwyg editor like Numbers, Google Sheets or Excel for my brain to grasp it. I’ll stick with an external app for now and maybe embed it into a canvas or something. Hope it gets an update!

[helloMars]

After learning how Obsiden is built I see that it would not be super trivial to make these extensive GUI and fundemental function changes, BUT… At least the developers have lots of inspiration to pull from - from Microsoft Word to Mark Text to Convert Markdown Table to Excel - Table Convert Online etc…

I would think that many people are not using Obsidian as much as they would or want because it lacks a Pure GUI table editor. (:

I’m also curious if the developers even read a majority of these sporadic forum posts - my understanding is that it’s just a two person dev team? that’s crazy sauce!

[cwhiii]

I recently came across an absolute BEAUTY of a plugin for table management:

Stardusten / ob-table-enhancer

I waxed on about it in this post:

Integrate Stardusten's "ob-table-enhancer" in Core

This plugin is FAR and away the best table editing tool for Obsidian I’ve been able to find. It’s at least an order of magnitude better than any of the other tools for tables. It lets you just treat the table like a table, rather than a constantly shifting stack of pipes and dashes. Beautiful. Glorious ease! This is the level of table editing that should be available out of the box for Obsidian. Can we get this pulled into the Community Plugins list? And then integrate it directly Obsidian? St…

[laurentgl]

Unfortunately, the plugin does not work for me, but it may be due to the theme I’m using (AnuPpuccin). Anyway, this is great that developers are working on proposing better table solutions. Do you know whether this would allow us to enter multiple lines in one cell?

[cwhiii]

It does, by automatically adding a bit of HTML.

[Flexit]

I’m using the plugin “Excel to Markdown Table”.

It’s only a matter of copy and paste and I have the possibility to take advantage of the great and much superior original manageability of Excel.

Inside the Obsidian markdown file I put the link to open the original Excel (2003 version, I don’t need anything better and it’s very fast on current computers)

[specta]

+1 Had a table that was one column of links and another of images. The long rows of (shortened example)
|[text tttt...](long urllllllllllllllllllllllllllll ...) | ![\|400](long urlllllllllll...)|
had most of the text off the screen with two columns with URLs.

Had to move the data to excel for ease of edit but it looked better and was among my other data in Obsidian, it just wasn’t easy to edit and add to.