latex - Latex Table - latex tutorial



How to Create Tables in Latex?

  • Generating a table of contents can be done with a few simple commands.
  • LaTeX will use the section headings to create the table of contents and there are commands to create a list of figures and a list of tables as well.

Code to create a table of contents:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents

\newpage

\section{Section}

Dummy text

\subsection{Subsection}

Dummy text

\end{document}

After compiling the .tex file two times, you will get the following table of contents:

 step1 content design in latex

step1 content design in latex

  • The generation of a list of figures and tables works the same way.
  • Dummy figure and table are put in the lists in the appendix of my document:

Sample Code:

\begin{document}
...
\begin{figure}
  \caption{Dummy figure}
\end{figure}

\begin{table}
  \caption{Dummy table}
\end{table}
...
\begin{appendix}
  \listoffigures
  \listoftables
\end{appendix}

\end{document}

After compiling two times again, the lists will be generated like this:

 step2 content design in latex table

step2 content design in latex table

  • A lot of times, it is necessary to have data nicely structured in a table. LaTeX offers an environment for table creation.
  • For this purpose we use the table and tabular as well as the center environment.
  • The table environment merely holds our other environments and allows to add a caption to our table.
  • The actual data is contained in the tabular environment and we center the table on the page using the center environment.
  • The table I use for demonstration look like this:
 caption in latex table

caption in latex table

  • The according code contains ampersands & as column seperators and newline symbols \\ as row seperators.
  • The vertical lines are passed as an argument to the tabular environment (e.g. \begin{tabular}{l|c||r} ) and the letters tell whether we want to align the content to the left (l), to the center (c) or to the right (r) for each column.
  • Row seperators can be added with the \hline command. The \caption and \label commands can be used in the same way as for pictures.

Sample Code:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\begin{table}[h!]

  \centering

  \caption{Caption for the table.}

  \label{tab:table1}

  \begin{tabular}{l|c||r}

    1 & 2 & 3\\

    \hline

    a & b & c\\
  \end{tabular}

\end{table}

\end{document}
  • There are two disadvantages of writing tables by hand as described.
  • While it works for small tables similar to the one in our example, it can take a long time to enter a large amount of data by hand.
  • Most of the time the data will be collected in form of a spreadsheet and we don't want to enter the data twice.
  • Furthermore once put into LaTeX tables, the data can not be plotted anymore and is not in a useful form in general.
 caption content in latex table

caption content in latex table

Coding requires just a few changes:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{booktabs}

\begin{document}

\begin{table}[h!]

  \centering

  \caption{Caption for the table.}
  \label{tab:table1}

  \begin{tabular}{ccc}

    \toprule

    Some & actual & content\\

    \midrule

    prettifies & the & content\\

    as & well & as\\

    using & the & booktabs package\\

    \bottomrule

  \end{tabular}

\end{table}

\end{document}
  • I suggest you to try out all the features of LaTeX tables by yourself.
  • It's usually faster to use a tool like excel to format your content and then let the pgfplots package autogenerate a table for you.


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