A table in an article is part of the writing, like a paragraph: it moves with the text above it, splits between its rows when it reaches the foot of a page, and carries on at the top of the next one. Each cell holds text, with the same bold, italic, colours and links as the rest of the article.
Putting In a Table
Choose Table from the page toolbar's Insert menu, or type / at the start of a line and pick Table. You get three columns and three rows, with the header row on and the caret in the first cell.
The palette's table element is a different thing: it places a table freely, loose on a page or sitting in the writing as an object. Only Insert and the / menu make a table that is part of the text.
Typing in a Table
- Tab moves to the next cell, along the row and then down; Shift+Tab goes back. Tab in the last cell adds a new row (for an Editor).
- Enter starts a new line inside the cell.
- Up and Down on a cell's first or last line move to the cell above or below, and out of the table past its first or last row.
- Drag across cells to select them whole; Backspace or Delete then empties them, and a copy of them pastes into another table.
Rows, Columns and the Header Row
While the caret is in a table, the page toolbar shows a Table menu:
- Insert Row Above and Insert Row Below.
- Insert Column Left and Insert Column Right.
- Delete Row and Delete Column. Deleting a table's only row or column deletes the table.
- Header Row: on, the first row is bold on a soft tint of the article's accent, and repeats at the top of every page the table continues onto. A new table starts with it on. Insert Row Above is unavailable in the header row, so it stays first.
- Delete Table.
A table holds up to 500 rows and 20 columns; at a limit, the menu's entry is greyed out and its tooltip says why.
Column Widths
Columns share the width of the text, so a table always fits its page, whatever the margins or paper size. Hover the line between two columns and drag it to move width from one to the other. Escape during the drag puts the widths back.
Pasting Tables
Copy a table from Google Sheets, Excel, Numbers, a web page, Word or Google Docs and paste it into the writing: it arrives as a table, its header row on when the source had one. Tab-separated text of at least two lines and two columns, and a Markdown table, paste as a table too. The columns share the width equally, merged cells are split, and rows past 500 or columns past 20 are left out.
Paste cells copied from a table into another table's cells and they fill the cells from the caret onwards; anything else pasted into a cell goes in as its text.
Good to Know
- Comment and Assign Action are not available inside a table: select words outside it to comment on them.
- Exports draw the table as on screen, split across pages with the header row repeated, in a PDF, PNG or SVG. Word export writes it as a Word table, and importing a Word document brings its tables in as tables.
- Collaborators each save their own cell, so two people typing in different cells never overwrite each other.
- Participants can type in a table's cells, but not add or remove rows or columns, change the header row or widths, or put a table in. Viewers only read.
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