Tables provide a tabular format of your data. From the Tabulate window (Figure 1) you can view the data and results, as well as print the table, copy the selected contents of the Tabulate window to the clipboard, adjust the display of the data, and save the data to an ASCII file. Following is an overview of the menu bar of the Tabulate window.

The commands available from the menus are:

• File: From this menu, you can print the data in a tabular format and view a plot of the data. Available commands are: Save, Save As, Print, Print Preview, Export, Plot, and Close.
• Edit: From this menu, select data to be copied to the clipboard. Available commands are: Allow Editing, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, and Compare Data Sets.
• View: From this menu, you can control the appearance of the data displayed in the Tabulate window. Available commands are: Commas, Reverse Order, Date and Time Separately, Date with 4 Digit Years, Show Decimal Places (up to 6 decimal places), and Show Missing As (blank, 901.00, M, -M).

Displaying Data

By default, data is displayed with commas and two decimal places. If you want to change the way the data is displayed, from the View menu there are several options. If you do not want commas displayed, from the View menu, click Commas.

For time series data the date and time are displayed in the following default format: ddmmmyy hhmm. You can change the way the date and time are displayed. From the View menu, click Date and Time Separately; and the date and time are now displayed in two separate columns in the table. Another way is from the View menu, click Date with 4 Digit Years; and the date displays a four-digit year instead of a two-digit year.

Numbers by default are displayed with two decimal places. If you want to see more or a smaller number of decimal places, from the View menu, point to Decimal Places, and click on the number (up to 6 decimal places) of decimal places you would like displayed.

ASCII File

You can save the table of data to an ASCII file. Right-click on the table, and from the shortcut menu, click Export. The Table Export Options dialog will open (Figure 2). From this dialog, you can set certain options for the ASCII file.

You can set the delimiter for the file from the Field Delimiter drop-down list. The field delimiter choices are TAB (default), SPACE, COMMA COLON, and SEMI-COLON. You also make choices on whether the file contains fixed width columns, strings are set in quotes, whether to include column headers in the file, include gridlines in the file, and whether to include the a title in the file.

When you have all of your options set, click OK, and a Save browser opens. Find the location where you want the file saved, and provide a filename. Click Save, and the file is created without a filename extension. Since this is an ASCII file, you might want to give the file an extension of .txt.

Printing

The Print command opens a standard system Print dialog. From the Print dialog you can select the printer, choose to print to a file, and the number of copies to print. Click OK, and the Print dialog closes, and the table will print to the selected printer.

Another way to print is to right-click on the table. From the shortcut menu click Print, and the Properties dialog (Figure 3) opens. From this Properties dialog, you can set up the format of the table for output. From the Page tab, you can set the orientation; fit the table to a page, and decide whether to include the entire table or only a selection.

In addition, you can also choose to print the table in ASCII, add headers, add background color to headers (non-ASCII option), and add gridlines.

If you want to add header or footer information to the table report, click the Header/Footer tab. From the Header/Footer tab enter header or footer information.

The title of the table report defaults to the pathname tag associated with the data. If you want to change this title, click the Table Title tab. From the Table Title tab, enter or change the title, and decide if you want the title to print on each page of the report. When you have everything set click Print, and the Print dialog opens.

To preview your table report, right-click on the table, and from the shortcut menu, click Print Preview. The Properties dialog (Figure 3) opens. Setup your options for the table report, click Print, and the Print Preview dialog (Figure 4) opens.

From this Print Preview dialog, you can view the table report, adjust the scaling of the report, and print the report. The Print command automatically prints the report.