Columns, Tables, and Templates

Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How can I add tabular data to a LaTeX document?

• How can I organize my text into columns?

• How can I use existing LaTeX templates to style my document in accordance with publisher or organization guidelines?

Objectives

• Create and customize a table in LaTeX.

• Re-organize our LaTeX document into multiple columns.

• Learn where to find and use LaTeX templates.

Tables & tabular data

Manually marking up tables in a LaTeX document can be a time-consuming task. It’s often a better idea to begin by exporting your tabular data from another source and then copying/pasting the LaTeX code that those tools generate into your LaTeX document. You can generate LaTeX tables using tools like:

• .to_latex() in pandas/Python
• stargazer for R
• excel2latex for Excel
• tablesgenerator.com

But let’s create a simple table in LaTeX manually to better understand the general structure. First, we want to use the tabular environment in LaTeX, which we need to customize by adding a parameter that includes how many columns to include. When we’re adding our data to the table each ampersand (&) is a cell separator and a double-backslash (\\), which we’ve seen before gives us a line-break, denotes the end of a row.

\section{Results}
\begin{tabular}{ c c c }
cell 1a & cell 1b & cell 1c \\
cell 2a & cell 2b & cell 2c
\end{tabular}

We can modify the display of this table a bit. Add borders to the table using pipes (|) in between your column parameters and horizontal lines with \hline rules between the row content.

\begin{tabular}{| c | c | c |}
\hline \hline
cell 1a & cell 1b & cell 1c \\
\hline
cell 2a & cell 2b & cell 2c \\
\hline \hline
\end{tabular}

We can also add labels and and captions using the \label and \caption commands, but for those to display correctly we will also want to add a floatable table environment using \begin{table}. The h! option for the table environment overrides LaTeX table defaults and places the table ‘here’ in the text of your document. We can also center the whole table on the page using the \centering command.

\begin{table}[h!]
\centering

\begin{tabular}{| c | c | c |}
\hline \hline
cell 1a & cell 1b & cell 1c \\
\hline
cell 2a & cell 2b & cell 2c \\
\hline \hline
\end{tabular}

\caption{This table is highly scientific.}
\label{table:1}
\end{table}

Overleaf provides a more in-depth introduction to tables in LaTeX.

Columns

It’s relatively easy to create a two column LaTeX document, by adding a twocolumn parameter to your document class statement.

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}

To work with more than two columns at a time, you can import the multicol package and use the multicols environment within your document. In curly brackets following the multicols environment \begin command you can enter the number of columns, and in square brackets you can add any column headers you want to include in between square brackets:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multicol}

\begin{multicols}{3}
[
\section{Methodology}
]
\lipsum

\end{multicols}

We can add a \setlength command in the document preamble passing the \columnsep parameter with the amount of separation we’d like to see between the columns below. Here’s a list of lengths and units you can use in LaTeX.

\setlength{\columnsep}{.75cm}

OverLeaf’s Introduction to Multiple Columns goes into greater depth on the many ways to set up different column options in your document.

LaTeX templates

Many publishers share document templates for authors in various formats such as Word and, increasingly in the sciences, LaTeX. A great way to learn more about LaTeX is to actually import a LaTeX template in Overleaf and notice the packages and formatting that is built in to the document.

IEEE, for example, provides detailed instructions on how to use the IEEEtran LaTeX class to produce conference and journal submissions to IEEE.

IEEE Journal Template

Let’s use the IEEE Template Selector to choose a LaTeX template for a specific journal.

1. Choose Transactions, Journals, and Letters
2. Select the first publication from the list, Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
3. Choose Original Research and Brief
4. Select the LaTeX file format, and Download the template.
5. Unzip the folder, and upload the bare_jrnl_new_sample4.tex file into Overleaf.
6. Select the file in Overleaf and choose the Recompile button to view the conference paper template.

If you scroll through the compiled document you’ll see many examples of formatted equations, tables, bullet lists, and much more. You can use the File outline in the bottom left corner of Overleaf to jump to different sections of the LaTeX document to see how different content in marked up to follow the IEEE journal style.

Note: The University of Minnesota doesn’t have an official LaTeX template for PhD thesis formatting. There is a user-created template on GitHub but it requires you to build the thesis locally on your command line or to use GitHub Actions to create a thesis PDF on GitHub from your LaTeX files. Unfortunately, this template wouldn’t work (without significant adaptation) on Overleaf or other LaTeX editors.

Key Points

• Tables can be created in the {tabular} environment and there are many options for customization.

• Documents can be arranged into two columns using the twocolumn parameter option in our document class, and the multicol package can provide further customization.

• Many publishers and other entities create LaTeX templates that allow for easy formatting to meet journal, conference, and other requirements.