Tables in LaTeX

Mak­ing tables in LaTeX is one of the few areas where LaTeX is more dif­fi­cult than a WYSIWYG editor.

Here are some point­ers to tools and pack­ages that I have found useful.

• Excel2LaTeX: this excel add-​​in makes it easy to copy a rec­tan­gu­lar array of cells in a spread­sheet into a LaTeX document.
• Calc2LaTeX: a sim­i­lar exten­sion for Libre­Of­fice and OpenOffice.
• The LaTeX wik­i­book has a great page on pro­duc­ing tables in LaTeX.
• Toolkit Instal­la­tor:this is a col­lec­tion of add-​​ins for WinEdt. It con­tains two fea­tures that are use­ful for tables.
  1. A graphic table designer for inputting sim­ple tables.
  2. A util­ity for mak­ing exist­ing tables neat by lin­ing up the & and remov­ing unnec­es­sary space.
• Tuto­ri­als on tables from the Indian TeX users group:
  1. The basics
  2. Long tables
  3. Coloured tables
• The array pack­age for apply­ing for­mat­ting com­mands to whole columns and pro­vid­ing addi­tional for­mat­ting options for paragraph-​​like columns.
• The tab­u­larx pack­age for set­ting a table with fixed-​​width and para­graph columns with width auto­mat­i­cally calculated.
• The book­tabs pack­age for pro­vid­ing nicer hor­i­zon­tal lines and bet­ter spac­ing control.
• The longta­bles pack­age for tables that are too big for a sin­gle page.
• Type­set­ting tables with LaTeX: a nice (and short) arti­cle cov­er­ing the basics as well as the above four packages.
• Type­set­ting tables with LaTeX: video of Klaus Höpp­ner giv­ing a talk based on the above article.