On the left is the NFPA 704 standard ' fire diamond' with example values indicated and on the right is a simple table displaying the same values, along with additional information. It provides a familiar way to convey information that might otherwise not be obvious or readily understood.įor example, in the following diagram, two alternate representations of the same information are presented side by side. They can condense large amount of information to a limited space and therefore they are popular in scientific literature in many fields of study.Īs a communication tool, a table allows a form of generalization of information from an unlimited number of different social or scientific contexts. In literature tables often present numerical values, cumulative statistics, categorical values, and at times parallel descriptions in form of text. This structure is typically visually presented with an appropriate number of white spaces in front of each stub's label. Multi-dimensional tables may have super-rows - rows that describe additional dimensions for the rows that are presented below that row and are usually grouped in a tree-like structure. Tables may contain three or multiple dimensions and can be classified by the number of dimensions. The first column often presents information dimension description by which the rest of the table is navigated. Column 1 and row 2 will only correspond to cell (2,1) etc.Column 1 and row 1 will only correspond to cell (1,1).This is an injective relation: each combination of the values of the headers row (row 0, for lack of a better term) and the headers column (column 0 for lack of a better term) is related to a unique cell in the header), the row, and other structures in more complex tables. In multi-dimensional tables, each cell in the body of the table (and the value of that cell) relates to the values at the beginnings of the column (i.e. A common example of such a table is a multiplication table. Table by normalizing the data values into ordered hierarchies. Any 'simple' table can be represented as a 'multi-dimensional' The concept of dimension is also a part of basic terminology. The summary information consists of subtotals that are combined from previous rows within the same column.

This is called a 'header row'.Īn example of a table containing rows with summary information. The first row is not counted, because it is only used to display the column names. The following illustrates a simple table with three columns and nine rows. Additionally, a table may include metadata, annotations, a header, a footer or other ancillary features. The elements of a table may be grouped, segmented, or arranged in many different ways, and even nested recursively.

the intersection of a row and a column is called a cell.a column name can consist of a word, phrase or a numerical index.a column is usually identified by a name.the term column has several common synonyms (e.g., field, parameter, property, attribute, stanchion).the term row has several common synonyms (e.g., record, k- tuple, n-tuple, vector).Certain considerations follow from this simplified description: This is a simplified description of the most basic kind of table. A table consists of an ordered arrangement of rows and columns.

Tabular data definition