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A table is written the way Markdown writes one, and the file keeps every pipe and dash:
The editor shows it as a table: a border with rounded corners, a line under every row and at every column, the header in the bold weight on a faint fill, and a little room round every cell’s words. Each column is as wide as its widest cell, whatever the font — the narrower cells are padded to fit, so the columns line up in Helvetica as they would in a monospace face. Nothing is drawn from the file’s own marks and nothing is added to it: the pipes and the separator’s dashes are laid out but never shown, and move the caret through a row and every character is still there. A table is never wider than the page. When its columns would be, the widest are narrowed first, together, and a cell longer than its column wraps under it — a key on the left, a paragraph on the right, the way a sheet of practicalities reads — with the row’s lines running the full height of the wrapped cell. A long cell in a column that is not the last wraps the same way, and the cells after it in that row follow on its last line rather than sitting in their columns; the grid leaves those columns open for that row. Narrow the window and the table narrows with it. A column’s alignment comes from the separator, as it does everywhere: --- or :--- for left, ---: for right (numbers, usually), :---: for centre. Bold, italics, links, chips and dates work inside a cell as they do anywhere, and a cell can be empty. The separator is the one place smart dashes could get in the way, and they stand down there: type | --- | --- | with them on and the hyphens stay hyphens, where before they became an em dash and the table came apart. A separator that was already turned to | — | — | somewhere else — in a message, say, before it was pasted — still reads as a table here, and a paste straightens it.

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Moving about

Tab goes to the next cell and selects what is in it, so typing replaces it; ⇧Tab goes back. Tab from the last cell of the last row adds a row. Outside a table Tab keeps its other meanings — nesting a list item, picking from the slash menu.

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Starting one

/table in the slash menu writes a two-column table with a header, the first heading selected and ready to be typed over; /table 3x4 writes three columns and four rows, the header among them (/table 3 is three columns). A table pasted from a web page, a spreadsheet or a document arrives as a pipe table already, and so do cells separated by tabs — a selection copied out of a spreadsheet, or a table a page handed over as plain text.

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On the cards

A document’s card — on the All Documents wall, among the fanned pages, and in the pip’s preview — draws a table it holds as a small grid: up to four columns and five rows, the header on its fill, each cell one line, and a note under it counting what is left out.

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In Review and on paper

Review, the page beside the editor and the PDF draw the same table with real rows and columns, in each style’s own way — ruled in Glass and GitHub, open in Book, tight in Mono. A row wider than the page wraps rather than being cut off; the table still reads, if less neatly, and everything in it can be reached.