Markdown tables are to be honest quite horrible.
They are hard to use, ironicaly them being render makes it worse, rather then better.
Extreemly limited in what they can contain, and really not great.
Proposed solution
Bases are great!
But bases are a database. it stores data from many files and is designed like that.
I belive it is possible to utilise bases, to fix tables.
All it need is a view that has more freedom with how cells are located.
While technicaly, it is also viable ot create a whole new file type support, that then like bases can be then embeded, and so on.
I am pretty sure that it is can be instead atached on top of the bases infastructure.
What makes it much lighter functionality.
Realisations
The two simplest things, are a view, that switches files and property, so files are columns, and propertis are the rows. Just that is alredy would been great.
But the second thing is a way to allow base’s table view to wrap around, in example of aready exiting table view, instead of taking infinite line, ability to limit how long the line is, and instead alocate a seccond line to the same file.
(With or without an additional header)
I had been thinking about something similar for quite some time, when the need arose to create simple tables with the ability to merge cells.
Markdown tables do not have this capability, and separate software for creating spreadsheets is too cumbersome, unwieldy, inconvenient, and subjectively repulsive in terms of UI/UX.
And besides Spreadsheets, I couldn’t find any simple software that would allow me to just create a table — only office Spreadsheets or database software.
The community has created a couple of plugins for Spreadsheets, but when I last checked them, unfortunately, they didn’t even support internal links…
Then I also thought that it would be convenient if Obsidian developed its own file format for simple tables, with the ability to at least merge cells, control column width and row height, and, optionally, apply styles. And export the table as an image. As was previously the case with Canvas, and now with Bases.
I also really dislike tables in Markdown:
Speaking not only about tables, lately I’ve been thinking more and more that Mermaid lacks a graphical interface shell that would simplify the process of creating different visualizations. And adjustments to what the visualization looks like, because the current one seems too ugly.
I really like this feature. In my ideal workflow would be to start with a table (something like inline bases view) and then with a button convert to a real bases where notes and properties are created in bulk, such that I can add extra information in each note when the research needs it.
To start would be nice to have a plugin that convert a table to a bases by creating notes in batch. Later on would be great to have same view of the md table as the bases one.