Scientific Word is a commercial application that allows you to create LaTeX files using a graphical interface. For those that don’t enjoy writing plain LaTeX, it’s an indispensable application. Unfortunately, its table editing capabilities are somewhat cumbersome — you can’t simply cut and paste from Excel like you can if you are creating a document in Word.
However, Scientific Word allows you to import RTF files into your LaTeX document. Theoretically, the process goes like this:
- Create your table in Excel
- Paste it into Word and save your document as an RTF file
- Import the RTF file into your Scientific Word document to access your table
Unfortunately, with newer versions of Word, this process doesn’t seem to work. I suspect that this is because the RTF speficiation that newer versions of Word use has changed since the RTF2LaTeX utility that Scientific Word uses under the hood was written.
However, I have discovered that if you use WordPad, the basic text editor that comes with every version of Windows, to save your RTF file, table import is much more successful (probably because WordPad uses the same RTF specification as RTF2LaTeX).
An additional tip: once a table has been imported, rather than the cell contents, you will see the cell widths that the RTF file was using:
However, if you select the table, right click on it, select Properties > Column Width > Use Automatic Width you will now be able to see the the cell contents (as well as some LaTeX alignment commands):
