Table Illustrator: Puzzle-based interactive authoring of plain tables

Plain tables excel at displaying data details and are widely used in data presentation, often polished to an elaborate appearance for readability in many scenarios. However, existing authoring tools fail to provide both flexible and efficient support for altering the table layout and styles, motivating us to develop an intuitive and swift tool for table prototyping. To this end, we contribute Table Illustrator, a table authoring system taking a novel visual metaphor, puzzle, as the primary interaction unit. Through combinations and configurations on puzzles, the system enables rapid table construction and supports a diverse range of table layouts and styles. The tool design is informed by practical challenges and requirements from interviews with 10 table practitioners and a structured design space based on an analysis of over 2,500 real-world tables. User studies showed that Table Illustrator achieved comparable performance to Microsoft Excel while reducing users’ completion time and perceived workload.