Lists Tables

By the end of this lesson you'll turn loose notes into tidy bullet lists, numbered steps, nested outlines, tick-box checklists, and clean aligned data tables — using nothing but a few keyboard characters.

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Part of the free Markdown course at LearnCodingFast — hands-on lessons with examples you run in your browser, plus practice exercises and a quick quiz.

Think of Markdown lists and tables like a handwritten outline on paper . A dash is you drawing a bullet point. Indenting a line is you sliding your pen to the right to show "this belongs under that". A checklist is a to-do note with little boxes you tick off. And a table is you drawing vertical lines (the pipes | ) to make columns, with one ruled line under the headers to separate them. Markdown just turns those everyday paper habits into characters you type — and the viewer redraws them neatly for you.

1. Unordered (Bullet) Lists

An unordered list is a set of bullet points where order doesn't matter. Start each line with a - , * , or + followed by one space . All three characters produce identical bullets, so the choice is purely cosmetic — just pick one and stay consistent.

Most style guides recommend the dash - because it's easy to type and reads cleanly in raw text. The one rule you cannot skip: there must be a space after the bullet character . -Apples (no space) renders as literal text, not a bullet.

2. Ordered (Numbered) Lists

When order does matter — steps in a recipe, a ranking — use a number, a period, and a space: 1. . Here's the surprise that trips everyone up: Markdown ignores the digits you type and numbers the list itself, in order. So you can write all 1. and still get 1, 2, 3. That's a feature — you can reorder steps without renumbering by hand.

Use a period after the number ( 1. ), not a parenthesis ( 1) ). Many parsers only recognise the period form. And keep the space: 1.Wake up won't become a list.

3. Nested Lists (Indentation)

To put a list inside a list item, indent the child line. The reliable rule: indent each level by two spaces (some tools accept four). The indentation is what creates the hierarchy — get it wrong and the child either jumps to the top level or breaks the list entirely. You can mix types freely: bullets under a numbered step, numbers under a bullet, etc.

Replace each ___ with two spaces to indent the children correctly. Run it, then picture the bullets nesting under their parents.

4. Task / Checklist Lists

Task lists are bullet items with a clickable checkbox. Write a bullet, then [ ] for an empty box or [x] for a ticked one (a space inside the brackets means unchecked). They're hugely popular for to-do lists, pull-request checklists, and READMEs on GitHub, GitLab, and most modern viewers.

5. Tables

A table is three ingredients stacked as lines: a header row , a separator row of dashes, then one or more data rows . Columns are divided by the pipe character | . The separator row — at least three dashes --- per column — is what tells Markdown "this is a table". Leave it out and you just get a row of text with pipes in it.

Good news: the cells don't need to line up in your raw text. The viewer ignores extra spaces, so | React | JavaScript | and a perfectly-padded version render identically. Aligning them by hand just makes the source nicer to read.

6. Column Alignment

Add a colon : to the dashes in the separator row to control how each column lines up. The colon shows which side the text "sticks" to: left colon = left, both = centre, right colon = right. Numbers usually look best right-aligned.

You can also use inline formatting inside cells: | **bold** | *italic* | | all work.

Fill in the ___ cells. Keep the same number of pipes on every line, and don't delete the separator row — it's what makes it a table.

This prints the raw Markdown for bullets, numbers, nesting, and checkboxes. Read each line, then paste a block into a Markdown viewer to watch it render.

Q: Do I have to make the table cells line up in my source?

No. The viewer ignores extra spaces, so a ragged table renders the same as a perfectly-padded one. Aligning by hand only makes the raw text easier for you to read.

Q: I typed 1, 2, 5, 9 for my list but it shows 1, 2, 3, 4. Why?

Ordered lists always renumber from the first value, sequentially. Markdown only reads the first number to know where to start; the rest of the digits are ignored. This lets you reorder steps without renumbering.

Q: My checkboxes show as [ ] text instead of boxes — what's wrong?

Task lists are a GitHub-flavoured extension, not core Markdown. They work on GitHub, GitLab, Obsidian, VS Code and most modern viewers, but a few plain parsers don't support them. Try it on GitHub or Dillinger to confirm.

Q: Can a table cell hold a bullet list or multiple lines?

Not in standard Markdown — cells are single-line and can only hold inline formatting like **bold** or . For multi-line or merged cells, drop down to raw HTML inside your Markdown.

No blanks now — just a brief and an outline. Write the console.log lines yourself to print a task list and a right-aligned table, then paste the output into a Markdown viewer to check it renders correctly.

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