Why Printed Tables Deserve Extra Care

A table in a printed report looks harmless enough until you have to reproduce it. Every figure sits in a precise relationship to the ones around it, and the moment you retype it, those relationships become your responsibility. A misplaced decimal point or a column that drifts half a centimetre to the right can change the meaning of a row entirely, and a reader comparing your typed version with the original will notice immediately.

Printed sources also arrive in awkward forms. Pages are photocopied at a slight angle, columns run into the gutter, footnotes are set in tiny type, and faint dot-matrix originals can make a 3 look very much like an 8. The work is not difficult, but it rewards patience and a method. Here is how to approach it so the finished document matches the original faithfully.

Set Up the Page Before You Type a Single Figure

Resist the temptation to start typing the first row straight away. A few minutes of preparation saves a great deal of correcting later.

• Choose the right orientation. If the table has more than five or six columns, use landscape. It is far better to turn the page than to squeeze columns until figures wrap onto two lines.
• Plan for splits. A long table that runs over a page break should repeat its header row on each new page, with a note such as continued overleaf at the foot of the first part.
• Set tab stops, not spaces. Pressing the space bar repeatedly will never align a column properly, especially if the typeface changes. Use a right-aligned tab stop for whole numbers and a decimal tab stop for figures with fractions.
• Decide on a consistent font size for the table body, often one or two points smaller than the surrounding text, and stick to it throughout.

Aligning Numbers and Decimal Places

Alignment is where typed tables most often betray themselves. The rule is simple: units sit under units, tens under tens, and every decimal point lines up vertically down the column.

Decimal tab stops do this automatically. If your software does not offer them, right-align the whole column and pad it so the decimal points fall in the same position. Where the original shows figures to two decimal places, keep two decimal places throughout — do not trim a trailing zero from 4.50 to make it 4.5, because that zero signals the precision of the measurement.

Watch for the details that printed reports handle quietly:

• Thousands separators — commas in the UK, and used consistently in every figure of four digits or more if the original does so.
• Negative values — shown with a minus sign or in brackets, whichever the source uses, and never mixed.
• Ranges — an en dash between figures, as in 2019–2023, with no spaces around it.
• Percentages and currency — the symbol or unit placed exactly as in the original, whether in the column header or against each figure.

If a cell is blank in the original, leave it blank. Do not insert a zero or a dash unless the source does, because blank and nil are not the same thing in a report.

Labels, Units and Footnotes

Column headings carry a great deal of meaning, so transcribe them in full, including any bracketed units such as (£ thousands) or (%). If a heading spans several columns, describe it once and let the subheadings sit beneath it rather than repeating the wording in each cell.

Footnotes matter more than their size suggests. A small superscript letter or number against a row usually points to a qualification — a revised estimate, a change of definition, a figure that excludes something. Type the marker in the same place and reproduce the note beneath the table, keeping the original wording. Where a note explains that totals may not sum because of rounding, that sentence is part of the table, not optional commentary.

Handling Charts, Diagrams and Captions

Figures in the visual sense need a slightly different treatment. You are not redrawing the chart, but you are responsible for its labels, its caption and its source line.

• Type all axis labels, legends and data labels in full, checking spellings of category names.
• Place captions consistently. Tables conventionally take their caption above; figures take theirs below.
• Number tables and figures in sequence and refer to them in the text by the same numbers.
• Include the source note exactly as printed, along with any date or basis of preparation mentioned.

If a chart contains a small data table beneath it, treat that as a table in its own right and apply the same alignment rules.

Checking Your Work Against the Original

Proofreading figures is not the same as reading for sense. Read the typed table against the printed one row by row, running a ruler or a sheet of paper beneath each line so your eye does not jump. Then do a second pass in the opposite direction, comparing column by column.

Pay particular attention to 1 and 7, 3 and 8, 5 and 6, and to any figure that has been broken across a photocopy fold. Finally, check the arithmetic: if the original shows totals, add the columns yourself and confirm they agree. Where they do not, check whether a footnote explains why before you assume you have mistyped something.

Done carefully, a typed table should be indistinguishable from the printed original in all the ways that matter — same figures, same alignment, same labels, same notes. That is the standard worth aiming for.