Obsidian - Working With Tables

Tables are a constant in tabletop RPG prep—loot tables, encounter choices, random generators—and markdown’s basic table syntax is slow and fiddly, especially when alignment and spacing start to matter to the writer’s OCD. The practical fix is to stop hand-building tables and instead use the Advanced tables plugin for Obsidian, which turns a few pipe-delimited headers into a ready-to-fill table layout automatically.

With Advanced tables enabled, typing a header row like “column 1 | column 2 | column 3” and pressing Enter triggers the plugin to generate the table structure, including the heading section and cell boxes. From there, tabbing through cells behaves like spreadsheet entry: each tab moves to the next cell, and rows can be added without wrestling with markdown formatting. The result is a workflow that feels closer to Excel than to raw markdown—especially when tables need to be edited frequently during campaign prep.

Advanced tables also supports formulas, which is where the plugin moves beyond “just easier table creation.” The plugin’s documentation points to spreadsheet-style capabilities inside markdown, including arithmetic and functions like SUM and MEAN, plus conditional comparisons (e.g., greater-than-or-equal). Formulas are inserted using a specific syntax that begins with a “table formula” directive and ends with a closing marker, and the formula can reference columns by number (e.g., “$1”, “$2”, “$3”). A key operational detail: formulas don’t automatically recalculate just because a note opens. Instead, the Advanced tables side panel includes a formula button that runs calculations for the table currently selected.

The transcript demonstrates a column-four calculation built from other columns, using nested addition to avoid limitations when combining more than two column expressions at once. It also shows SUM-based totals across a column range, and highlights a common gotcha: adding or inserting rows/columns changes which columns the formula should reference, so totals may need to be updated (for example, shifting from summing columns 1–3 to summing 1–4 after a new column is inserted).

Beyond formula power, the workflow gets a major boost from importing tables from elsewhere. Copying tables from Excel into Obsidian may paste them as blank or unstructured content unless a dedicated converter is installed. The transcript names “Excel to markdown table” as a plugin that converts copied spreadsheet tables into proper markdown tables automatically on paste.

For tables coming from the web or HTML sources (like D&D Beyond), the transcript also recommends a conversion tool: table2markdown.com (described as “convert spreadsheet to markdown”). The approach is to paste an HTML table into the tool, submit, then copy the generated markdown back into Obsidian. When automated conversion fails—particularly with older PDFs—the fallback is brute force: copying cell-by-cell into Excel and then converting, or using a PDF/HTML-to-markdown converter and testing what works.

Overall, the core takeaway is that RPG table prep in Obsidian becomes manageable when Advanced tables handles creation and calculations, while Excel-to-markdown conversion and table2markdown-style tools handle ingestion from the messy real world of websites, spreadsheets, and PDFs.