How to create a table

Tables, despite their seemingly simple nature, can be one of the most effective data visualization tools in your toolbox. Their ability to host a different "data type" - words, specific numbers, images, sparklines, or bar charts - in each cell makes them surprisingly versatile. The combination of words, numbers, and images all in an organized grid makes communicating information so much easier.

This guide will show you how to create your first table with Datawrapper. Our tables are feature-rich and fully responsive, meaning they will adapt to different screen sizes. We'll use the example of the change in life expectancy by country from 1960-2016, since it was used in our blog post introducing the new table features.

1

Preparing and importing the data

Our tables require at minimum one column or one row of any data type (number, text, or date)

That's it! Of course, it is likely that you will have more than one column or row of data. You can also choose whether or not to select the first row as header one you're further in the process.

Here's a small snippet of the data we used:

Country 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964
Afghanistan 32.29 32.74
33.18
33.62
34.0
Angola 33.25
33.57
33.91
34.27
34.64
Albania 62.28
63.30
64.19
64.91
65.46
United Arab Emirates 52.26
53.31
54.35
55.37
56.38
Argentina 65.02
65.14
65.23
65.31
65.39
👉 For more information about cells with images, see the article about parsing markdown.
👉 If you'd like to have a column with country flags, see this article. 
Go to   app.datawrapper.de/chart/create and paste your data there. Then click on "Proceed" to get to step 2: Check & Describe.
2

Check & Describe

Once you upload your data, Datawrapper automatically identifies your data columns as either a number, text, or date column. It also detects empty cells and assigns null-values. They will be kept empty in your table, so you don't have to worry about them.

If everything looks well, click on Proceed at the bottom left to go to Step 3: Visualize.

3

Visualize

In step 3, you see a grid of possible chart types. Choose the Table chart type:

You will now see a table, without a title, descriptions, or customized colors. Next, you want to refine and annotate this chart. We cover this in a separate short tutorial found here.

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