△ Create Shortcuts for interacting with markdown tables via spreadsheets

Published Jul 29, 2022

• ember/projects

I had originally designed these shortcuts to make it easier to get Markdown tables into and then out of classic spreadsheet apps (e.g., Excel/Numbers).

However, I recently learned (that link’ll only work if you’re in the Obsidian Discord server) that this song and dance is unnecessary.

Convert the Markdown table to HTML (e.g., view it in Reading or Preview mode in the app of your choice), select it and copy it, then paste it into your spreadsheet. Presto! When you’re done editing, copy the rows and columns in the spreadsheet and paste it back into your markdown editor (at least, this works in Obsidian and it’ll paste as a markdown table.

I’m leaving the Shortcuts here in case they’re still helpful for some reason. Maybe someday I’ll adapt them to be able to copy certain formatting (e.g., highlighting) back and forth.

Note: these don’t work on iOS. ☹️

• Spreadsheet to Markdown Table
• Markdown Table to Spreadsheet

• Adapt Viticci’s 2014 shortcut to automatically generate header rows
• Create a shortcut to generate actual tables paste-able into Numbers/Sheets/Excel from markdown tables
• Test the shortcuts more on iOS