Transcript with Timestamps
00:00
Hey there. Good evening, Adam here. today I want to show you the Advanced Tables plugin for Obsidian, which is my favorite community plugin for Obsidian. First off, let me show you quickly how to install it. You’re going to go into Settings, you’re going to go to Community Plugins and then you’re going to browse Community Plugins and click on Advanced Tables and then you’re going to hit Install, which will be here my this installed because I already have it installed. You’ll have to hit Enable and you’ll be good to go. Advanced Tables plugin basically allows you to skip the learning how to do all the markdown using all the bars and all the hyphens, everything else to get good formatting. The basics of this table plugin is you’ll have a row at the top which will have your titles that will title your rows and then you’ll have your information down below.
00:56
For example, let’s just say we’re going to do a table of people who have provided comments about one of our programs. The first thing we’re going to do, you have to at least start the table before the plugin will kick in. You do that by pressing Bar and then let’s just say we’re going to have Name hit a space and then hit Tab. So this will enable a table. You now have two options. You can do it pseudo manually or you can go over to the right and click on the Advanced Tables icon. This will allow you to do it pretty much automatically. You’ll see that it says you can move columns around, you can add columns you can justify. What I like to do, at least to start with, is to do the titles myself and then you can add and subtract here as necessary.
01:54
I’m going to do Name, Date, and then you hit Tab again and you see it’ll. Add another one down below and then Comment, and then you’ll hit Enter. And now you have your table. Let’s just say our first person’s name is John Smith. He made the comment today. You hit Tab again. Comment was today. What is it, the 12th or 14th or whatever it is? 22 comment was, I don’t like it. You’ll hit Enter and you’ll see it’ll start another row. If you realize that you want to have an additional row for I honestly have no idea, you can add or delete the column. You can delete the row, delete a column. To delete the row, obviously close it out because that was the bottom row. Or you can delete this column. Let’s just say you don’t want the comments to be here and I’ll show you why you can just hit delete column.
03:04
And now you got name and date. This is why I’m thinking you just want the two comments can get kind of long so let’s just say you can actually just make a page for each one of these people that are commenting. Let’s just say you want to put the comment in a full page. You can just do link with the brackets. Don’t need that. Now you go to John Smith’s page and say, I didn’t really like it. Too cumbersome. Now if you go back to your table and you hover, the comment will be right there, and you can add as much detail as you want. You can say, let’s just say I didn’t like him very much either. You can really pretty creative with this by adding links to other pages. That’s really what the purpose of the program is anyways, is to interlink all of your information to provide context without having to explain the context on each single page.
04:13
You can combine it all under reasonable subheadings, and then you can just hover. If you need to make changes, you can. Otherwise the context is there when you need it. But this table sort of helps. If you want to, you can sort you can do all sorts of fun things with it. You can add formulas to do math in it. I don’t really tend to do that. I’m mostly just use it for just text. Because honestly, if you’re doing math, just go up in Excel. I mean, that’s the reality of it. Don’t do math inside of a markdown text file. I hope this was helpful to you. If you have any questions, let me know, be happy to answer them. And thank you very much. Bye.