Is there a plug in or something that can convert Ms Word or Ms Excel tables exactly as they are (with borders etc) to Latex? I have used http://www.ctan.org/pkg/excel2latex but it removes the lines in between cells. I also tried to use http://www.tablesgenerator.com/# but it is time consuming and I have large and complicated tables
asked May 20, 2015 at 15:02 user1930901 user1930901 773 6 6 gold badges 12 12 silver badges 16 16 bronze badgesDefine 'complicated'. If it's just large, that shouldn't be a problem -- but if the tables are actually complex (tables within tables (shudder), etc.), then you won't have much luck.
Commented May 20, 2015 at 15:43@user930901 See this discussion for another option tex.stackexchange.com/questions/179208/how-to-use-calc2latex. This requires you have LibreOffice installed with the calc2latex addin enabled. Again is can handle simple tables with simple formatting.
Commented May 20, 2015 at 16:37by complicated I mean large and borders and lines separating each row and column and also some cells are merged
Commented May 20, 2015 at 16:55 Sounds simple enough for excel2latex -- have you tried it? Commented May 20, 2015 at 17:18Excel2LaTeX used to override your rules if you enabled the booktabs option. As of v3.4.0 it doesn't do this anymore. So anyone reading this in the future should give it a shot! (Disclaimer: I currently maintain Excel2LaTeX.)
Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 7:19I have used the calc2latex macro in LibreOffice Calc to convert MS Excel files into LaTeX without issue. It handles borders and cell outlines fairly well.
This package, found at http://calc2latex.sourceforge.net/, is mentioned in a comment by @r-schumacher; however, it should be an official answer.
answered Nov 29, 2016 at 17:00 Alex Willison Alex Willison 285 3 3 silver badges 6 6 bronze badgesThere's always excel2latex; I'm not sure how well it works, but it's on CTAN.
If this or some similar program doesn't work, and it is absolutely, positively not an option to recreate these tables in LaTeX, the best you'll probably be able to manage is convert them to an image and include them that way.
It seems that there are some convoluted ways to do this from within Excel (see, e.g., convert MS tables to images.
You can also simply take screenshots and get the images that way.
You can then include the resulting image in your LaTeX document in the usual way:
\documentclass \usepackage \begin \includegraphics \end
The problem with this approach is that your fonts, line thickness, and such may not match those in your tables. But that is a peril of using binary or non-transparent file formats.
answered May 20, 2015 at 15:38 dgoodmaniii dgoodmaniii 4,310 1 1 gold badge 20 20 silver badges 36 36 bronze badges Check out this Youtube video for excel2latex : How to Convert an Excel Table to a Latex table Commented May 14, 2022 at 18:42To say it short: No.
A little bit longer: If you want to have good looking tables you can find hints in several books over typography (for example the german book "Lesetypografie" or "Detailtypografie", I do not have english books, sorry) that for a good typography you should use empty place and no lines. Only to mark the header and the bottom of a table you can use lines (call package booktabs for this and please read the documentation of it).
To get good tables you need a good constuction of the table. I fear in the most cases you can only get this with good old handwork .
@Sean Allred clarified in his comment: in the absolutely general case (i.e. arbitrarily complex), conversion is not possible. However, scripts exist which try to take the most simple of these cases and create an analog for them with LaTeX. It very much depends on how complicated you made your table with a format that nobody but Microsoft really understands.