After more than a year in the making, the new version of my Table Creator plugin for Figma is now live.
The biggest challenge was figuring out how I would let designers share their components. Because of this, the plugin was completely rewritten from the ground up with a new architecture for managing table designs, known as templates. Templates are a concept I use in my own work when I have components that I commonly need to detach. What makes templates useful in Table Creator is that even after you've created a table based on a template, you can still keep some of the changes to the template in sync with tables you've already created.
In this version, Table Creator has taken creating tables to a whole other level. Some of the things you can experience, include:
The biggest challenge was figuring out how I would let designers share their components. Because of this, the plugin was completely rewritten from the ground up with a new architecture for managing table designs, known as templates. Templates are a concept I use in my own work when I have components that I commonly need to detach. What makes templates useful in Table Creator is that even after you've created a table based on a template, you can still keep some of the changes to the template in sync with tables you've already created.
In this version, Table Creator has taken creating tables to a whole other level. Some of the things you can experience, include:
- A brand new onboarding experience
- Manage more than one table design (templates)
- Copy and paste templates between files
- Use templates in team libraries and share between files
- Customise the width and height when you create a table
- Tables are now intelligently created based on cell variants
- Create tables using smart defaults using the $ symbol, that are based on characteristics of the template such as column width, column count, or table width
- Include other UI elements, like pagination and buttons when creating tables
- Change the axes of a table from using rows for frames to columns for frames
- Support for creating tables using keyboard commands with the Quick Actions menu
A lot of work went into devising the best way to allow these features and I am forever grateful to the community who have helped me test and iterate this version. Thank you to everyone that's emailed me, tweeted me or left me a comment. Without your help, I would not be able to identify all the interesting scenarios which are possible due to the complexity of the plugin and only having myself to test it.