Tables and charts in notes, still plain Markdown
Release 1.14.0 adds tables and charts to notes. They stay plain Markdown, and in a shared note nothing is ever rewritten whole, so edits do not collide.
Release 1.14.0 adds tables and charts to Prior's notes. You write in cells, paste from a spreadsheet, sort a column, add a total row, and turn a small table into a bar, line or pie chart. The editor is also fuller: you can drag blocks, turn one kind of block into another, format selected text, fold content in a toggle and start from a template.
The part we want to explain is a choice we made early: a table and a chart are still plain Markdown text. Nothing new is stored, and the server did not change. That choice is why they work in shared notes, where several people edit the same note live.
What they look like in the file
A table is a Markdown pipe table:
| Client | Hours |
| --- | --- |
| Anna | 32 |
| Marc | 18 |
| **Total** | =SUM |The =SUM cell shows the sum of the numbers above it. A chart is a fenced block labelled chart. Inside the fence there are optional type: and title: lines, with type being bar, stacked, line or pie, and then a table: the first column holds the labels and each other column is one series.
type: pie
title: Hours by client
| Client | Hours |
| --- | --- |
| Anna | 32 |
| Marc | 18 |That is the whole format. Prior draws the chart when it renders the note, with colors from the app's own chart colors, checked in light and dark themes.
Why plain text matters
A client without this feature, such as an older version of the app, shows a table as lines of text with pipes, and a chart as a code block labelled chart. It can type in them like any other text. Nothing is stripped or rewritten when it opens or saves a note, so these blocks survive. If an edit breaks the shape, for example by deleting the line under the header, the block shows as text here too, with all its words, until someone repairs it.
It also means an assistant reading or editing a note through MCP sees ordinary text.
Why nothing is rewritten whole
The obvious way to build a table editor is to parse the table, change it and write the whole table back. In a shared note that goes wrong. Two people edit different cells at the same moment, each writes the whole table back, and one of them loses their change.
Shared notes are Yjs documents, built to merge many small edits. So every table action is the smallest set of text replacements that does the job:
- Typing in a cell replaces the characters of that cell. The padding around it is left alone and the pipes are not re-aligned, so nobody else's cell is touched.
- A new row is one inserted line.
- A new or deleted column is one small edit per line, run in a single transaction. Collaborators never see half a column, and undo takes it back as one step.
Here is what happens when people collide:
- Two people in different cells, or one adding rows and columns while another types: everything is kept.
- Two people typing in the same cell: both words stay, as in any Yjs text.
- A row deleted while someone types in it: the typed words survive at the start of the next row, not lost.
- Two rows or columns added at once: both stay.
- Two people picking another chart type at once: the result is a type that does not exist, which draws as bars until someone picks again. The data is untouched.
One action can lose work. Sorting rewrites the body rows as one replacement, so it can overwrite a keystroke made at the same instant in a row it moves. We left it that way because sorting is a deliberate, one-off action, and we kept it out of the always-small edits.
The tests cover these cases: two sessions through a fake server editing cells, rows, columns and chart types at the same time, plain text edits from an older client, and undo.
Editing
Click a table and it becomes a grid. Tab moves between cells, and Tab past the last cell adds a row. The tools under the table are Row, Column and Total. Pasting tab-separated text from a spreadsheet makes a table. A chart opens with its type buttons, its title, the live chart and its data. Data shows the numbers as a table for anyone, viewers included.
Prior AI can write tables and charts in a note too. It shows which page it takes as context, and it changes the note only after you confirm.
Tables, Charts and Shared notes in the help center cover how to use them. For how assistants edit shared notes, see Prior now works inside your AI assistant.