Tables

The tabular environment

The tabular environment is the most basic way to create a table in LaTeX and doesn't require any other packages.

\begin{tabular}{|lcr||}
  left aligned column & center column & right column \\
  \hline
  text & text & text \\
  text & text & text \\
\end{tabular}

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The parameter (|lcr|| in the example) is called the table specification and tells LaTeX how many columns there are and how they are supposed to be formatted. Each letter represents a single column. Possible values are:

Character	Meaning
l	left aligned column
c	centered column
r	right aligned column
p{'width'} e.g. p{5cm}	paragraph column with defined width
	(pipe character)

Cells are seperated by the & character. A row is ended by 2 back slashes \\.

Horizontal lines can be inserted by using the \hline command.

Tables are always formatted to be wide enough to include all the content. If a table is to big, LaTeX will print overfull hbox warnings. Possible solutions include using the p{'width'} specifier or other packages like tabularx.

A table with column headings spanning over several columns can be created using the command \multicolumn{cols}{pos}{text}.

\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
&\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{Income Groups}\\
\cline{2-4}
City&Lower&Middle&Higher\\
\hline
City-1& 11 & 21 & 13\\
City-2& 21 & 31 &41\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}

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Note that the command \multicolumn has three mandatory arguments: the first argument specifies the number of columns over which the heading spans; the second argument specifies the position of the heading(l,c,r); and the third argument is the text for heading. The command \cline{2-4} specifies the the starting column(here, 2) and ending column(here, 4) over which a line is to be drawn.

Coloring Table

To make the table more readable, following are the ways to color it:

1. Rows
2. Columns
3. Lines
4. Cells

Coloring Rows

Use \rowcolor (provided by colortbl (opens new window); also loaded by xcolor (opens new window) under the [table] package option). Example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{ | l | l | l | }
  \rowcolor{green}
  A & B & C \\
  \rowcolor{red}
  D & E & F \\
  G & H & I \\
  \rowcolor{blue}
  J & K & L
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

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Coloring Columns

Columns can be colored using following ways:

Defining column color property outside the table tag using `\newcolumntype`:

 \newcolumntype{a}{ >{\columncolor{yellow}} c }

Defining column color property inside the table parameters

 \begin{tabular}{ | >{\columncolor{red}} c | l | l }

Example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}

\newcolumntype{a}{>{\columncolor{yellow}}c}
\newcolumntype{b}{>{\columncolor{green}}c}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{ a | >{\columncolor{red}}c | l | b }
  \hline
  A & B & C & D \\
  E & F & G & H \\
  \hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

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Coloring Lines

Use \arrayrulecolor. Example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}

\arrayrulecolor{blue}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{ | l | l | l | }
  \hline
  A & B & C \\
  \hline
  D & E & F\\
  \hline
  G & H & I \\
  \hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

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Coloring Cells

Use \cellcolor. Example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{ | l | l | l | }
  \hline
  A & B & C \\
  \hline
  D & E & \cellcolor{green}F \\
  \hline
  G & H & I \\
  \hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

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We can define our own colors too using package colortbl. Following are the tags examples:

   \definecolor{Gray}{gray}{0.85}
    \columncolor[RGB]{230, 242, 255}}
    \columncolor[HTML]{AAACED}