I’ve been using Obsidian for a while now, and it’s a tool that gets better as I use it.
Normally, that sort of statement is due to a tool’s complexity being an inhibitor at first, and then gradually an asset. There’s no question that this is true for Obsidian.
However, it’s also the case that Obsidian, itself, has gotten markedly better over the time that I’ve been using it.
What prompted this post is the recent change in the way Obsidian handles tables.
Obsidian has always supported tables, although they are not necessarily a standard Markdown feature. The support was very bare-bones, and I used the wonderful Advanced Tables and Table Extended plugins to make them more useful to me.
When a recent update to Obsidian announced that tables support had improved, my first thought was to wonder if I would need my plugins anymore. While that answer is a qualified “yes”, what Obsidian has added is by no means unhelpful.
I also use Okular as my primary PDF viewer. One of the nice features in Okular is the ability to select a table, including specifying where the row and column breaks fall, and then to paste it elsewhere.
In my previous workflow, this always required a lot of post-processing. Things sped up a bit when I discovered that pasting into LibreOffice resulted in a working table that I could then convert to text and paste into Obsidian.
All of that has changed. I can now pasted those tables (some of which are pretty large) directly into obsidian, with Obsidian taking care of the formatting.
So, what are the qualifications on my “yes” to keeping my two Tables plugins?
- Advanced Tables has the marvelous ability to start typing a table and then use a hotkey (I use ctrl-enter or ctrl-tab) to tell Obsidian, “Based upon what I typed, make this a table.” It’s possible that I’ll eventually stop using this in favor of the new table support’s version (using the mouse), but for the time being I’m going to keep Advanced Tables.
- Table Extended does something I haven’t seen anywhere else, and it’s pretty cool. The only downside is that it’s not visible in the default editor: you have to go to preview mode to see it. Therefore, all of the editing is manual.
Table Extended allows me to make multi-row and multi-column cells, and especially multi-row headers. This is absolutely essential for tables where columns are grouped under larger headings.
Anyway, I may at some point post more about how I’m using Obsidian, but for now I just suggest you try it. Oh, one more thing I love: I use a plugin called Obsidian Git to automatically commit my changes and then push them to a remote git server. Automatic backup, plus I can now work on multiple machines without corrupting my files (because of git’s commit tracking).