utilities
Quick Tables with LaTeX
Today two friends of mine came for a visit and one of them mentioned LaTeX – he had to prepare a large table the other day and was quite annoyed. Setting tables in LaTeX can – even for seasoned users – be a daunting task. When I started out using LaTeX I had to face this fact early and I was very eager to find something to help me typeset tables quickly.
The Excel2LaTeX Plugin is a very effective utility to convert Excel sheets to LaTeX tables. You can download it from the CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) here: http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/excel2latex/. After you have added it in Excel, an additional button will show up in your toolbar.
Using it is quite intuitive: highlight the cells you need in your table, click on the button (if some error message pops up, close it) and a new window with LaTeX code appears. The converter will also handle multicolumn cells, alignment and escape special characters ($, %, ^, …).