Tables are used to display information visually for a reader. They provide structure for the text in order to guide the comprehension of the reader. In this post, we will learn how to make basic tables.

Basic Table

For a beginner, the coding for developing a table is somewhat complex. Below is the code followed by the actual table. We will examine the code after you see it.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
   \begin{tabular}{ccc}
      \hline
      Vegetables & Fruits & Nuts\\
      \hline
      lettace & mango & almond\\
      spinach & apple & cashews\\
      \hline
   \end{tabular}
\end{document}

We will now go through the code.

• Line 1 is the preamble and tells LaTeX that we are making an article document class.
• Line 2 is the declaration  to begin the document environment
• Line 3 is where the table begins.  We create a tabular environment. IN the second set of curly braces we used the argument “ccc” this tells LaTeX to create 3 columns and each column should center the text. IF you wan left justification to use “l” and “r” for right justification
• Line 4 uses the “\hline” declaration this draws the top horizontal line
• Line 5 includes information for the first row of the columns. The information in the columns is separated by an ampersand ( & ) at the end of this information you use a double forward slash ( \\ ) to make the next row
• Line 6 is a second “\hline” to close the header of the table
• Line 7 & 8 are additional rows of information
• Line 9 is the final “\hline” this is for the bottom of the table
• Lines 10 & 11 close the tabular environment and the document

This is an absolute basic table. We made three columns with centered text with three rows as well.

Table with Caption

A table almost always has a caption in academics. The caption describes the contents of the table. We will use the example above but we need to add several lines of code. This is described below

• We need to create a “table” environment. We will wrap this around the “tabular” environment
• We need to use the “\caption” declaration with the name of the table inside curly braces after we end the “tabular” environment but before we end the table environment.
• We will also add the “\centering” declaration near the top of the code so the caption is directly under the table

Below is the code followed by the example.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
   \begin{table}
      \centering
      \begin{tabular}{ccc}
         \hline
            Vegetables & Fruits & Nuts\\
         \hline
            lettace & mango & almond\\
            spinach & apple & cashews\\
         \hline
      \end{tabular}
         \caption{Example Table}
   \end{table}
\end{document}

Conclusion

We explored how to develop a basic table in LaTeX. There are many more features and variations to how to do this. This post just provides some basic ideas on how to approach this.

There are times when we want to depict hierarchical relationships in a diagram. Examples include workflow chart, organizational chart, or even a family tree. In such situations, the tree diagram feature in LaTeX can meet the need.

This post will provide an example of the development of a tree diagram used the tikz package. Specifically, we will make a vertical and a horizontal tree.

Vertical Tree

First I want you to see what our final product looks like before we go through each step to make it.

As you can see it is a simple tree.

To develop the tree you need to setup the preamble with the following.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\end{document}

There is nothing to see yet. All we did was set the documentclass to an article and load the tikz package which is the package we will use to make the tree.

The next step will be to make a tikzpicture environment. We also need to set some options for what we want our nodes to look like. A node is a created unit in a picture. In our completed example above there are 5 nodes or rectangles there. We have to set up how we want these nodes to look. You can set them individually or apply the same look for all nodes. We will apply the same look for all of our nodes using the every node/.style feature. Below is the initial setup for the nodes. Remeber this code goes after \begin{document} and before \end{document}

   \begin{tikzpicture}
      [sibling distance=10em,level distance=6em,
      every node/.style={shape=rectangle,draw,align=center}]
   \end{tikpicture}

The options we set are as follows

• sibling distance = how far apart nodes on the same level are
• level distance = how far apart nodes on different adjacent levels are
• every node/.style = sets the shape and text alignment of all nodes

We are now ready to draw our tree. The first step is to draw the root branch below is the code. This code goes after the tikzpicture options but before \end{tikzpicture}.

\node{root branch};

We will now draw our 1^st child and grandchild. This can be somewhat complicated. You have to do the following

• Remove the semicolon after {root branch}
• Press enter and type child
• make a curly brace and type node
• make another curly brace and type 1^st child and close this with a second curly brace
• press enter and type child
• type node and then a curly brace
• type grandchild and close the curly braces three times
• end with a semicolon

Below is the code followed by a picture

\node{root branch}
   child{node{1st child}
      child{node{grandchild}}};

We now repeat this process for the second child and grandson. The key to success is keeping track of the curly braces and the semicolon. A Child node is always within another node with the exception of the root. The semicolon is always at the end of the code. Below is the code for the final vertical tree.

\node{root branch}
   child{node{1st child}
      child{node{grandchild}}}
   child{node{2nd child }
      child{node{grandchild}}};

Horizontal tree

Horizontal trees follow all the same steps. To make a horizontal tree you need to add the argument “grow=right” to the options inside the brackets. Doing so and you will see the following.

Conclusion

As you can see, make diagram trees is not overly complicated in LaTeX. The flexibility of the tikz package is truly amazing and it seems there are no limits to what you can develop with it for visual representations.