Create table Medium

One of my favorite side hustles is writing blog posts on Medium. But it can be really frustrating that there is no support for a create table medium function. If you write non-fictional content, a table is really useful to present data in an easy-to-read way.

I will go through different alternatives and their drawbacks, and I will save the best for last.

Image as a table on Medium

One way is to just take a screenshot of the table you have created, for example, with Google Sheets or Excel, and paste it into your post.

Drawbacks

• You can’t copy text from an image showing a table.
• An image is static and usually doesn’t scale well with different screen sizes.
• An image is not SEO optimized; a lot of the details in the table as an image will not be available for a search engine.
• Increased load time. An image, especially one of high quality, is much larger than the same information represented as a table in text format. And thus, we will penalize the load time of the page.

Ascii art as a table on medium

Another way to create a table on Medium is to add a code block (it uses a font where all characters have the same width) and then add the information in an Ascii art like way.
You can try a tool like ASCII Table Generator.

Drawbacks

• Can be hard to fit the table if it’s wide
• Harder to read
• Takes more time to create

+-----------------------------+---------+---------+--------+----------+-----------+---------+
| Side Hustle                 | Online? | Profit- | Payment| Competi- | Passive   | Overall |
|                             |         | ability | Req.   | tiveness | Income    | Appeal  |
|                             |         |         |        |          | Potential |         |
+-----------------------------+---------+---------+--------+----------+-----------+---------+
| Freelance Writing           | Yes     | 4       | 5      | 2        | 2         | 40      |
| Graphic Design              | Yes     | 4       | 4      | 2        | 2         | 32      |
| Web Development             | Yes     | 5       | 4      | 2        | 2         | 40      |
| App Development             | Yes     | 5       | 3      | 2        | 4         | 30      |
| Social Media Management     | Yes     | 4       | 5      | 3        | 1         | 60      |
| Online Tutoring             | Yes     | 4       | 4      | 3        | 1         | 48      |
| Personal Fitness Training   | No      | 3       | 4      | 4        | 1         | 48      |
| Handmade Crafts Selling     | Yes     | 3       | 5      | 3        | 2         | 45      |
| Digital Marketing Freelance | Yes     | 4       | 4      | 3        | 3         | 48      |
| Photography                 | No      | 3       | 4      | 3        | 2         | 36      |
| E-commerce Store            | Yes     | 4       | 3      | 2        | 3         | 24      |
| Affiliate Marketing         | Yes     | 4       | 5      | 4        | 5         | 80      |
| Virtual Assistant           | Yes     | 3       | 5      | 3        | 1         | 45      |
| Podcasting                  | Yes     | 3       | 4      | 4        | 3         | 48      |
| Blogging                    | Yes     | 3       | 5      | 3        | 4         | 45      |
+-----------------------------+---------+---------+--------+----------+-----------+---------+

Embed a table

This is probably the best alternative we have for the moment. It allows you to create tables in a lot of different ways and styles, but it also has some drawbacks.

Drawbacks

• You rely on an external source, which can mean that it will stop working.
• SEO impact: an embedded table might not always be parsed by a search engine.

The above table is a gist that you easily can create if you have a free GitHub account.
It gives you a nice, clean table, but you lack the possibility to add more advanced features like sorting.

I hope that Medium will add a create table medium function in the near future so we can avoid hacks like this.