I was working in Notes this weekend and built out a table, ended up being 8 columns by about 30 rows. Probably would have been easier to work with as a proper spreadsheet in Numbers or Excel, but Notes was the most appropriate solution for this need.
Anyway…after working with this table for a while, I encountered some very odd behavior.
After putting text in a cell, I couldn’t exit the cell and then place the cursor back at the end of the text I just entered. I had to put it at the beginning of the cell and basically re-enter my content and delete the original.
I’d get auto-complete/correct mid-word, and it would leave the letter after the insertion point when the completion kicked in at the end of the word. For example, I could be spelling out “ibuprofen”, but the second half of the word would kick in after typing the “r” and I’d be left with “ibuprofenr”
When trying to move a row (by grabbing the handle on the left side of the table), sometimes it would select the whole table and then move it over top, creating a ghosting effect. But it was only a visual issue - it didn’t actually replicate anything.
Some text entered while in Light Mode (my system is set to change light/dark based on time of day), if I copied & pasted it after the switch to Dark Mode, pasted the text in black instead of white.
Visual artifacts when scrolling, like double-thickness horizontal lines which revert to normal after a horizontal scroll. This happens top and bottom.
Of course, it’s been 24 hours since this all happened and in that same note, I can’t replicate any of the above aside from the last one. And the text that pasted in black (penultimate item above) matches the rest of the table tonight, with no intervention on my part.
I really don’t think an 8x30 table should have pushed Notes enough that it would start glitching like this. Surely people have done far more complex things in this app, right?
I once overloaded Apple Notes several years ago by importing a large number of Evernote files. But I’ve never used AN for tables.
I did find the following reference on appleinsider.com, which does suggest there may be a limit on the size of a table in Apple notes.
“we worked with a large table in Apple Notes — that’s a table in the regular, word processing sense instead of Numbers’ version of a spreadsheet — and it was a problem.
After perhaps 60 rows of data, the note became slow to open and prone to crashing.”
That’s how I started my Notes database/system, importing from Evernote. I’ve got over 1200 notes now, and probably half came from Evernote originally.
The more I scroll around with this note and click in cells - not even making edits - the more visual weirdness happens. It disappears when I switch to another note and then come back, but it makes editing and even viewing a hassle.
I don’t consider an 8x30 table much data. It should be handled without difficulty. Especially when each cell is at most a dozen words - most are only 1-4. And no wacky formatting.
Maybe it’s because I have enough apps open that I’m using the pagefile? Too long since the last reboot?
On another note, there are very few (almost none) notes app which handle tables well.
Not just large data but along with formatting and other parameters. As someone who uses tables a lot in his notes, it has been frustrating past couple of years of jumping from one app to another, ending with coming back to Evernote whose tables I find acceptable along with other parameters.
UpNote and OneNote have good support for tables, but for me there were other issues.