Tables

Tables

Tables are shown as real tables and saved as GitHub-flavored pipe tables.

Inserting one

The table dropdown on the command bar (or the table icon, when the bar is wide enough) has Insert table. You get three columns, a header row, and two empty body rows.

You cannot insert a table inside a table — the action is unavailable while the cursor is already in one.

Moving around

Tab and the arrow keys move between cells. Type in a cell as you would anywhere else: a cell can hold bold text, links, inline code and so on.

Rows and columns

All four actions work on the table the cursor is in, and are unavailable outside one.

Action	What it does
Add row	Inserts an empty row immediately below the cursor's row
Add column	Inserts an empty column immediately to the right of the cursor's column, extending every row so the table stays rectangular
Remove row	Deletes the cursor's row and moves the cursor into the row that takes its place
Remove column	Deletes the cursor's column from every row, header included, along with its alignment

Two rules the editor holds to:

• The header row cannot be removed. A pipe table is nothing without its header — to get rid of a header, delete the whole table.
• The last column cannot be removed. A table with no columns is not a table.

Reading a wide table

Every other body row carries a light shade so your eye can follow one row across. This follows a row's position, so adding or removing a row re-shades the rows below it. The header is never shaded — it has its own emphasis, and one thick stripe under the header would read worse than a rhythm.

The shading is presentation only. A table is saved identically whether you can see the shading or not, and the same rows are shaded on screen, in exported HTML, and in the PDF.

Column alignment

Per-column alignment is preserved through every edit — adding and removing rows and columns keeps it — and it round-trips to and from the file. It is set by editing the table's separator row in the source panel:

| Left | Center | Right |
| :--- | :----: | ----: |

Typing past a table

A table is one of the two blocks you cannot type past from the inside (a rendered Mermaid diagram is the other). So the editor guarantees there is always an empty paragraph after one — a table is never the last thing in a document. Click below it and carry on writing.

Next

• Writing and Formatting
• Pages, Printing and Export