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.