Tables?
New to workflowy so not sure if this is a normal function?
- But is it possible to create or insert tables? That'd be helpful - for example - when creating a chart of Definitions for my Sales Team - it'd be nice to have it organized in a Table instead of keeping them via Bullets.
- I suppose if tables is not really a function of WF....my guess is that I should create the table in GoogleDocs and then put the Link into my Resource File found on WF.
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You can work with tables via third parties applications.
Have you looked, e.g. at http://tableflipapp.com for Mac, https://workflow.is and http://omz-software.com/pythonista/ for iOS?
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I'd love to have a table view. The 1st level sub-items would be the column headers, and their children would be the data for that column. This would make long lists that have many children much easier to view.
For example this data:
Could be switched to a table view like this:
Would love to have WorkFlowy do this simply, because I have data unnecessarily in Excel docs whereas it could all otherwise be neatly stored in WorkFlowy too.
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I too would love a table view!
I would suggest an adjustment to Aaron's idea. Rather than having each bullet point represent a column, it represents a row. A row typically corresponds to an entity in a spreadsheet, for example. For what it's worth, this is how Roam Research does tables. (But theirs is view-only, and I'd want to be able to edit the table!)
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I think it would be a really awesome if this could be implemented the say way as the "Kanban board" view, that is, a view that sits on top of the existing bullet-list (node-tree) structure.
Update: The Kanban board can actually be used for displaying tables:
However, using the Kanban view for displaying tables has two draw-backs. The first is that if any "cell" is longer than 1 line, it will mess up the horizontal alignment of the cells below:
The second problem with using the "Kanban view as a table" is that this requires the data to be wrapped as "columnar nodes", e.g. you make a column node, and list values under this, as such:
For some use-cases, this "columnar" orientation might be well-suited for your data. But in many other instances, it is more natural to describe the data as "rows of records", e.g. keeping the first-name and last-name next to each other, as follows:
And then when clicking the "Table view", the above would be converted to a table like this:
And maybe add a setting to hide the outer "Headers/Person1/Person2" nodes from the table so you get:
So, TL;DR:
- The easiest solution would be to add a table view that is almost exactly like the Kanban view, but with the rows aligned (in cases where some nodes span multiple lines).
- A second, complementary solution would be to add a "records" table view, where each node is a row, rather than a column.
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(Old suggestion, using JSON/YAML-like syntax. This is has the advantage that you can copy/paste to/from a YAML file. But it is probably too complex, so I'm withdrawing this proposal in favor of the simpler idea outlined above).
For instance, if you have the following nodes:
- Table:
- Person1:
- First name: Clark
- Last name: Kent
- Address: 1 Smallville St.
- Hobbies: Flying, running.
- Person2:
- First name: Lex
- Last name: Luthor
- Address: 666 Northpole Rd
- Hobbies: Hunting, shooting.
- Person1:
And you switch to the "Table view" (option located together with the to the "Board"/"Bullets" view-modes), with the "Table" node selected.
You would get a view like the following:
Where you can edit the table values just like you do in the Board view (but probably not edit column names).
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What can I say, Liran? You're right. Tables would be great. But we do have users mad at us for not having already implemented a few dozen things. The team is following its vision moving forward, based on user feedback and what makes us excited to build. The only thing is that we have 24 hours a day and we're a relatively small team.
You're welcome to join the conversation and be in touch with more team members than just myself here:
https://join.slack.com/t/workflowyusergroup/shared_invite/zt-s867uw4j-hxIqSvU7n6e7gXKwpjVWbw
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Tables would suit my major use case to a T. I have a document with 2000+ bullets, about half of which are part of 30 large, multi-layered tables I've hand-crafted using a mono font and spacing. Built-in tables would save me soooo much time and trouble.
I recognize the hard part is doing tables in a way that's still 'workflowy'. Some of my tables contain expandable bulleted lists, which may contain tables of their own. How do you do a mixed, free-flowing hierarchy of tables and lists embedded in each other? Not sure I'd want to be the one to write that functionality. But as a user, I crave it. :)
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+1
Like others have stated, an option to "align" bullets horizontally in Kanban View would be an easy first step in the right direction. - Can't be hard to implement, can it?
Kanban View with "Align bullets" + "Scroll lock" = Tables (or at least something good enough to start with) -
Thanks for the heads up, Tim. Definitely interested in taking a closer look at TANA.
Joined their mailing list, and filled out the survey for early access. Thanks again!
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Update
Didn't take much testing to realize Tana has a long way to go before it will compete with WF.
> My very first search test in Tana failed completely
> There's no way to insert hyperlinks into outline text
> There are also NO font formatting options
Decided to stick with what's working ~ and that's Workflowy. -
Tables are supported in Markdown.
Markdown, being an open standard, is, I assume available in code libraries, ready for implementation.
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