Table Border Options

Question

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
Column 1 & Column 2 & column3 \\
\hline
second row & & \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

Please help me with table border options. Using | I can draw thin solid vertical lines and \hline draws thin solid horizontal lines. I would like to achieve thick outer border, thin dotted lines of various size and color in the table. In short I would like to achieve similar functionality of attached screenshot of MS word table options in LaTeX. Also the reason for asking this is to put all table borders related answers at one place

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array,booktabs,arydshln,xcolor}
\newcommand\VRule[1][\arrayrulewidth]{\vrule width #1}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{!{\VRule[2pt]}c!{\VRule}c!{\color{red}\VRule[3pt]}c!{\VRule}}
Column 1 & Column 2 & column3 \\\specialrule{3pt}{0pt}{0pt}
second row & & \\\hdashline
third row  & & \\\specialrule{4pt}{0pt}{0pt}
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

Answer 2

There is the hhline package and the arydshln package. You can get colour in the table with the xcolor package.

You might have your reasons to typeset your tables with many different line styles... I'd usually recommend to avoid vertical lines at all and to draw horizontal lines with commands provided by the booktabs package.

In case you are writing something related to science, more or less all textbooks seem to roughly follow similar guidelines. Rarely you will find a vertical line.