What is LaTeX?

A LaTeX table is a tabular environment: a column specification, ampersands between cells and double backslashes at the end of each row.

Who uses it

Academic papers, theses and anything typeset with LaTeX or written in Overleaf.

Reading LaTeX

The tabular body is read, rules are dropped, and escaped characters are unescaped. Text wrapped in textbf or emph is reduced to the text itself.

Writing LaTeX

Rules are drawn with booktabs by default, which is what most journal templates expect. The characters LaTeX treats as special, & % $ # _ { }, are escaped so a value like 50% compiles instead of ending the line.

What it can hold

LaTeX is a markup language, and the important consequence is that it is a one-way trip: Describes how the table should be set on a page, so column widths and rules are part of the content. Keep whatever you converted from, because reading the table back out of LaTeX is a much harder job than writing it.

It keeps

Presentation - weight, alignment, colour and widths - alongside the values themselves.
A header that is marked as one, rather than being the first row by convention.

It cannot express

Types. Every value is text. A column of digits is indistinguishable from a column of numbers until something downstream decides to read it as one, which is where a leading zero usually disappears.
A null. An absent value and an empty one look the same, and nothing in the file says which was meant.
A partial read. The document has to be complete to mean anything, so a truncated file yields nothing and a large one has to be held in memory whole.

What it looks like

Example LaTeX

\begin{tabular}{lllll}
  \toprule
  id & name & role & started & hours \\
  \midrule
  007 & Halima Yusuf & Analyst, data & 2024-03-15 & 38.5 \\
  012 & Jonah "Jo" Pryce & Engineer & 2025-11-02 &  \\
  104 & Wei Chen & Manager & 2023-06-30 & 40 \\
  \bottomrule
\end{tabular}

Questions

Why does my table not compile?

The usual cause is a missing package. Booktabs rules need \usepackage{booktabs} in the preamble. Switch the rules option off and the output uses plain \hline instead, which needs nothing.

How do I open LaTeX files?

Any text editor will show you the contents. To read it as a table, paste it into the converter on this site and it appears in an editable grid. Nothing is uploaded.

Is LaTeX a good format for sharing data?

It depends who is receiving it. Academic papers, theses and anything typeset with LaTeX or written in Overleaf. If the recipient is outside that group, a plain CSV travels further than anything else.