Creating Table: On Mastering LaTeX

Question

Guys, I am one the process of mastering LaTeX, so that later when times come I shall be fully prepared to typeset almost anything without thinking twice. So during this awesome process, I am now encountering this tables on LaTeX. And they say that tables are the most boring, bad and worst aspect of the modern TeX-LaTeX.To quote-

However, if there is one area about LaTeX that I feel is the least intuitive, then I am afraid that this is tables.

So, after having read this statement from LaTeX wiki books, I stopped learning manually to type codes for LaTeX. I found the automated process of generating table codes for LaTeX from a Excel Add-in(Excel2LaTeX) and especially the LaTable by Alex Denisov are perfect for making tables. I tried some variations of tables and they seems to work perfectly and largely faster than the manual process anyway.

Real Question: Should I learn to manually code any types of tables, that needs to be made OR Should I just skip this part as automated process is perfect and go on to explorer other areas of LaTeX. So all LaTeX Guru's out there, What do you suggest ? I am in an dilemma. Don't know what to do. Suggestion of any kind will be truly appreciated. ;)

Answer 1

The more you become familiar with TeX and LaTeX the more you will want to 'control' it. It only takes a few hours for someone to use a decent class with LaTeX. Tables are actually not that hard to produce with LaTex, but they are very visual. At a point you will want to manipulate how they look in more detail.

Learning LaTeX takes a few hours, mastering it will take a few years - and if you are still studying, as my late professor used to say - anyone that has mastered TeX/LaTeX deserves a PhD just for that.

When you master TeX/LaTeX you continue a tradition which is over 500 years - that of producing beautiful books. Knuth tried to make it easier for us, by incorporating - as he is fond of saying about 100 typographical rules in TeX. Lamport made it even easier (but left a few out on the way). Incorporating tables straight from an Excel plugin will result in your data being imprisoned in a grid that is both aesthetically wrong and in most instances unreadable. Tables need to be read like the normal text of a page.

Answer 2

If you read any "how-to" manuals on constructing document-quality tables layout, make sure you include in this the first few pages of Simon Fear's documentation for the booktabs package. You'll very quickly start looking at table layouts with a discriminating "schooled" eye. From there you'll very quickly develop the motivation to educate yourself on the ins and outs of this. Do yourself a favour, read this doc; it's a reasonably quick read.

Answer 3

If it's the large quantity of data you don't wish to convert by hand from Excel (or some other spreadsheet program), then I suggest you convert it to comma separated values (or if you can choose the delimiter, choose &). Then you can use your favorite editor/scripting tool to replace all of the commas with & and add \\ at the end of every line. Then it's just a matter of writing the column specification.

Doing that will probably suffice for most cases. Some things might require more work, but that'll at least get your data into the format that LaTeX wants.

Answer 4

LaTable and the other Excel Plugin might provide a good basis to manage large data tables. But the produced LaTeX code will not look very nice and you might need to add additional effort, to reformat it in your favorite editor. LaTable might give you basic control over the table, but if you really go into details, you will need your editor -- and the possibility, to visualize the data in there in a readable way.

So my suggestion would be, to not use an external tool to create tables, but, if you need it, write your own skript to reformat large chunks of data. This might even flawless integrate into your editor and therefore your overall work flow.

Answer 5

I totally agree with you on the benefit of making table by Excel add-in. It's extremely handy in the case you just need to create "normal" tables - not a complex-structured ones, but there is a bunch of them!

Another great thing of creating tabular code from Excel is that, as doing research or statistics, many rows and columns are not raw material, they are the result calculating with different functions in Excel. If we want to create table Latex code by just writing, how can we deal with those calculated values?

Answer 6

I would recommend learning the pgfplotstables package. It takes comma or tab or whatever delineated files, allows you to set calculations to generate new columns, typsets things prettily, and you still have a fair amount of control. For those situations where you need to merge columns, rows, and so on, look at multicolumn and multirow.

Tables in LaTeX are really not very hard. There isn't much syntax (&, \\,\hline, \cline), and there isn't a lot of complexity.