Table in LaTeX

A table is built with the tabular environment: the column alignment goes in braces (l, c, r), cells are separated by & and rows end with \\. The table environment adds a caption and a number. The booktabs package gives rules that look like those in published papers.

\begin{table}[h]
  \centering
  \caption{Measured pendulum periods}
  \label{tab:pendulum}
  \begin{tabular}{ccc}
    \toprule
    $L$ [m] & $t$ [s] & $T$ [s] \\
    \midrule
    0.50 & 14.2 & 1.42 \\
    0.75 & 17.4 & 1.74 \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}

Common mistakes

• Vertical lines between every column: they make the table harder to read. Published tables use only \toprule, \midrule and \bottomrule.
• A table caption below the table: by convention table captions go above, figure captions below.
• Retyping data by hand. In CamteX you can paste it from Excel or CSV and get the code.

See also

• Figure in LaTeX
• Cross-references in LaTeX
• SI units in LaTeX