Best practices for presenting tabular source-code

Question

Background: Up to recently, I was the only one that read the sources of my LaTeX document. However, I now need to collaborate with others for co-authoring papers, as well as with journals editors.
I noticed very different layouts in .tex files for what concerns tables.

The basic structure I currently use to format my tables is:

\begin{tabular}{<columns-definitions>}
   \toprule
      <cell content>
      &
      <cell content>
      &
      <cell content>
   \\\midrule
      <cell content>
      &
      <cell content>
      &
      <cell content>
   \\
      <cell content>
      &
      <cell content>
      &
      <cell content>
   \\\bottomrule
\end{tabular}

Even if it's easy to find this or that cell content, the code spans over numerous lines. If there are many cells in a row, it is also uneasy to switch from one cell to the one under it.

Thus, I'd like to know how to format my .tex source-code in order to make easy for others to edit my tables?
Of course, I know this question can be seen as opinion based. However, I don't want to know what you do or you prefer, but rather what is the most efficient.

^{(I here neglected all refinement using other environment for tables (e.g., tabularx), formating it nicely using the booktabs package, etc. These advices do not fall into the frame of this question.)}

Answer 1

It depends a lot on your <cell contents> if they are paragraph based things (as ought to be the case with tabularx for example) I'd set it out as you have it (but always a newline after \\ rather than \\\toprule) but for data tables with moderate numbers of columns I'd set each row on one line, with the & lined up so it looks like a table.

Answer 2

The source code of any larger tabular environment in an editor always is a messy thing. I suggest to use Excel or LibreOffice Calc for the tabulars and export them to the *.tex file in due time, when you are done with them.