Turning tables in Apple Notes

A new feature released in macOS High Sierra and iOS 11 was the ability to create tables in Notes. Let’s see what it can do.

Late to the party

For as long as I can remember, Evernote and OneNote had the ability to create tables, whereas Apple Notes could not. Not anymore. Now you can create simple tables to display data.

Party poopers at the table

The table features in Apple Notes (and I believe in Evernote and OneNote) are not as powerful as in other applications like Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers. There’s no ability to create header rows or sort, but I guess they’re not really “party poopers”, since these are basic tables for displaying information.

What you can use them newfangled tables for

In my case, I was reading “48 Days to the Work You Love” and Dan says to review my job work history. Rather than create a bulleted list, I chose to create table instead so I could display some data points side by side. What’s nice about the table capability is that I don’t have to use a full-blown spreadsheet application which I normally would.

Some ways to buff up your plain tables

  1. Bold the top row so it looks like a header row.
  2. If the left column would be considered a header column, italicize it.
  3. You can add emojis to function as icons. Since you can’t insert checklists inside a table cell, you could use checkbox emojis or even X to indicate something done. However, that’s probably using the table for the wrong reason when a checklist would work better.

Anyway, I hope you found this useful and will try out the new tables feature for Apple Notes.

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