When I started as an editor at Simple-Talk, I had never heard of markdown. I had a couple of writers send me material with these weird formatting marks that I spent quite a bit of time clearing up. So it looked like this:

```SQL
SELECT ColumnName FROM TableName;
```

I had no idea what the three tick marks “` meant until soon after I left there because all my recent experience had been with use the Mammoth Word Document converter. It works pretty nice overall, but it had been something I had struggled with over the years trying to get other people’s documents into to work just right. (Ok, and my documents too.)

It worked by mapping styles in a Word Document to a style in a WordPress page. To do it well, I had my template with all the styles set up in the Word template with shortcut keys, which I used an Elgato Stream Deck to remember all the keys. I still use a stream deck for editing, which I will share about some day.

So when I started my own site, I tried hard to replicate that experience but better. Until recently, you couldn’t support plugins in WordPress without spending quite a bit more money than I was willing to spend on this site so I started trying to find the best way to work offline and then (more or less) paste in my text.

My favorite editors

In one way, Word was never a great place to start anyhow. I tend to start my blogs in one of two editors. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and iCloud Notes. I will write a blog about this later, but the idea is that I write in text first on my iPad and also on SSMS when I need the code first. One of the worst parts of iCloud Notes is that it isn’t really a text editor. (Even Notepad in Windows supports Markdown in a sort of annoying manner when your goal is to paste plain text into another tool).

Using Mammoth, it was impossible (as far as I found) to format the text to import into Word, so after I finished writing it all out in text, I pasted into Word, and then applied formats using Word styles.

It was kind of tedious at times, but it worked pretty fast and let you pre-define a lot of styles. When I started my own blog, my budget was a bit less than I had at Simple Talk!

. As I read more, I found markdown (which I admit, I called markup for a long time!) Then I found that WordPress allows you to paste in markdown directly into the blog and it will apply these formats for you.

I wanted to find some way to make things easy especially after an update we had finished not long before I left, and I wanted it as close to free as possible. I tried formatting directly in WordPress with hotkeys, but that did not work great with my Stream Deck for reasons I could not quite figure out.

Markdown made things easy

Using sites like Markdown Guide, I learned that you can make headings using 1 or more # characters to lead a line, code using backticks `, blocks of code with “` alone o line to start and finish some code, and quotes/tips/notes leading a paragraph with a > (also known as blockquotes), bullets with -, etc

This gets the first pass of editing done for you pretty quickly and pretty much anywhere. It is, of course, not super forgiving. If you don’t get the editing just right, you may need to go back to the editor and fix it. Not that much difference from using any formatting, but formatting in WordPress can be a bit tedious.

There are many things it can’t do (like adjust tables/font sizes/grid lines/etc, and images can be tricky because text editors and images don’t mix. So you lose the ability to automatically link your images by pasting them into a document.

My big hope is that someone reads this and can tell me an easy solution for images. I will quickly buy you a coffee or two.

Now I use it for all my notes

SSMS itself will render markdown if you save it as a .md file, so I frequently use it to document the contents of directories in my folders. So I typically edit in SSMS, add formatting as I go, and then paste it into a .md file and then make sure everything looks good.

Then I make sure the format is plain text (Ctrl-Shift-V) will usually will strip off the formatting in Windows), and paste into WordPress and it mostly looks fine. (I do a spell check, set the language for code, and add pictures when needed. (I loathe screenshots for the most part, but sometimes they are just easier, like for an overview of a query plan.)

Beyond that, I tend to use the # notation in my conference notes for headers, just because I really like working in text. I haven’t yet found an editor that I could use in Windows/iOS that saved everything in plain old text, but Notes isn’t bad.

Summary

Markdown is a great tool that probably everyone reading this blog is thinking “well duh”, except that person who is like me and never really had a need. Hopefully this helps you at least a bit.

So if you haven’t heard of it, I would love to hear from you. I sometime like to write posts like this simply because I find there are blazingly obvious tools that I have never heard of even though they seem obvious to so many other people.