Tired of Notion's overall sluggishness, I've switched my note-taking to Obsidian about a year ago. One thing I was missing for a long time was the ability to write tables. With the latest third-party plugins for Obsidian, I'm happy to say I'm able to re-create Notion's table functionality, using nothing but Markdown files under the hood.

Short Obsidian pitch

In case you're not using Obsidian, here's a quick pitch on why you should:

• It's a free (for non-commercial purposes) cross-platform tool. Mobile apps are in private beta at the time of writing.
• Your notes are kept locally in Markdown files, ensuring you'll have access to them even if Obsidian goes out of business in the future.
• You can sync your notes using any cloud software (I prefer Nextcloud).
• Plenty of first- and third-party plugins make it very extensible.
• Active community of Obsidian users helping each other and sharing things they've achieved with it.
• Ability to link between the notes and visualising those connections with pretty graphs.

A graph of my notes.

Examples

Before I go any further, here's some examples of what I've achieved:

Some examples of possibilities.

Plugins

To achieve that, I've used a combination of three plugins: