Best Practices in Table Design

Abstract

Even though best practices in table design have been well established for decades, I have found during my career as a technical editor that authors, editors, and graphic designers are often unfamiliar with them and sometimes have strong preferences for design elements that make tables harder to read. The fact that the built-in table styles in Microsoft Word are inconsistent with best practices does not help. Tables and other visual elements such as graphs, diagrams, and photographs are a critical part of most scientific and technical writing because they help readers remember key points, understand complex processes, and see patterns, similarities, and differences. Tables are visual elements because they display information in a logical sequence of columns and rows. Best practices in table design are important because designing a table that is effective is more complicated than you might expect. According to Scientific Style and Format, tables “can be the most difficult and time-consuming part of [preparing] a manuscript.”1,p678 Table Basics Before we get to the best practices, following are a few basics about tables. Tables are commonly used to show: Comparisons, such as the advantages, disadvantages, and cost of the options to fix a problem Lookup information, such as the cost of nails of various diameters and lengths Precise values A large number of numerical values A summary of information Figure 1 shows the basic components of a table. The left-most column, called the stub column, and the column headings contain the variables and are analogous to the x and […]