We’ve already talked a few times about the hidden potential of Notes. What many people use as a place to add simple text can even come close to a word processor like Pages or Word thanks to its support for images, richly formatted text, task boxes, attachments, freehand drawings and charts.
But in this last type of data, there is an inconsistency: the Notes interface in iPadOS does not allow you to add these tables. There is no button to do this like in macOS and iOS. So let’s see how to comfortably get around this pitfall.
A keyboard shortcut and two other ways to solve a lack for no apparent reason
There is a fairly logical way but chapucera To solve this problem: you create a new note on Mac or on iPhone, add a table from there, the note is synchronized with the iPad thanks to iCloud, and open it from this iPad so that you can edit this table. But of course, maybe you haven’t activated iCloud, or you don’t have an internet connection at the time to be able to sync the data, or logically you want something as simple as add a table to a note does not require the use of two devices
The solution is in a keyboard shortcut: ALT+CMD+T. The good news is that if you press this key combination on the iPad you will add a table that you can modify without problems:
The bad news is that you won’t be able to press this key combination unless you have a keyboard like the Magic Keyboard or any Bluetooth keyboard connected to the tablet. You can do this keyboard combo by taking advantage of Universal Control and using a Mac’s keyboard and mouse, but we’re back to the requirement of having another Apple device handy.
One thing you can do if you frequently use an iPad and tables in Notes (and don’t have a keyboard attached) to fix the mess is keep a note with multiple tables depending on your needs. This way, when you need to create one on the fly, you can just copy and paste the arrays of that note into a new note without relying on keybindings or timing:
These aren’t the best solutions, and in fact I wonder why Apple doesn’t add a simple button to add these tables in iPadOS when in iOS it’s perfectly visible just above the keyboard. Hopefully this will be something fixed in iPadOS 16.
