Many people want tables added, but there are different ways to do this. In the main topic “Table Functionality” Markdown was suggested as a means to get there. Relatedly, and currently on the Trello “top candidates to be implemented” column, we see Adding Columns to Items. People have also discussed making Table just be a view of an outline, but this hasn’t been a Topic. I think it’s worth discussing, so here it is!
Please discuss details of how this might work, and offer opinions on whether this is more or less desirable than adding columns to items, or than markdown tables.
How It Could Work
You make your outline like
Groceries
Food
Detail
Weight
Price
Bananas
organic
2 lbs
$0.69/lb
Bacon
Schneiders
345g
$3.45
Cereal
Cheerios
1kg
$17.50
Then you click on the hamburger and pick this new item:
View children as Table
And you get:
Groceries
Food
Detail
Weight
Price
Bananas
organic
2 lbs
$0.69/lb
Bacon
Schneiders
345g
Cereal
Cheerios
1kg
$17.50
Discussion
The style of the cells would be inherited from the style of the source nodes.
Being a view of your data, it’s somewhat analogous to Mind Map view.
I suppose (for ease of development) this would might be view-only, at least initially.
If part of your table has deeper items, they might not be visible in the table view.
Roam Research implements this method for their research tool. With them, the outline and the table are both visible at the same time.
This principle could be applied to other views as well. I often use Dynalist as sort of a vertical Kanban board. Similar to Alan’s idea above with tables, perhaps we could render the children of a node as a kanban board like Trello. Notion does something similar to this and it works really well.
Just raising the profile of this post to see if there’s more interest. The first post was around Christmas so people might not have been paying attention then.
As far as I understand Coda, it looks very interesting. Kind of like Notion but with scripting capabilities? I don’t see how that could be applied for Dynalist though.
I guess it could be done with css and scriptmonkey. Or a browser plugin. Heck I would even pay someone were they to make it. For instance, for just a editable table: free. For table that does summations and calculations paid 50$ one time fee…
A method that makes a lot of sense to me is to have the list interpreted as json, and thus each node consists of a key value pair.
Example:
Fruit table
apple
price:20
health:10
toblerone
price:100
health:2
danger:5
In this case, the nodes (Apple) become the table index and the keys are column names. Values are, well, values. If there is no key-value pair for a node, it would default to null. It’s a similar approach to many other json-to-table implementations.
One clear benefit of this over the OP post is that you can quickly input new data without having to worry about the parent storing column metadata. If I want to add “flavour” as a new column, all I have to do is update a single node and it becomes a column.
Below is a link that also serves to illustrate how to tackle the issue of multi-nesting (tl;dr only look at 1 level of depth).
I have just create an account to comment this. How can I support this request? is there any way to vote for this feature? I am searching for an outliner with table support to leave Onenote but I can’t find no one. Beside it, I love the solution suggested here.
(hope it’s not against the rules to mention this here, but:) I recommend looking at Notion.so in the meantime, if you haven’t heard of it. It’s been years since I’ve used OneNote, but from what I remember, they have a lot of similar features. And they just made the “personal” plan/usage totally free.
Yes, I know notion. However with outliner I mean a note manager in which you can collapse any sub-paragraph or open it in a new view. Like Dynalist, workflowy, Transno, roam research, Logseq, remnote…
What I would love is that a Folder shown a Board. A simple and clean implementation: clicking a folder shows all the docs within it as columns; and you could drag and drop in between them (like workflowy, trello, kanban…)
