Live Preview: Support editing a table cell by cell

[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.

[roaldarbol]

Great to see that a visual editor for Markdown tables is now on the roadmap (may have been for a while, but I hadn’t noticed it before).

[WhiteNoise]

Will be implemented in v1.5

Obsidian 1.5.0 Desktop (Catalyst)