About two years ago I wrote a blog post describing how the #table M function can be used to generate tables, but in that post I only covered the functionality I used regularly – namely using #table with a list of column names or a table type in the first parameter. However there two other variations on #table that I have used recently that I thought were worth pointing out.

For example, if you need to generate a table with a set number of columns but you don’t care what the columns are called, you can use an integer in the first parameter to get a table with that number of columns. The following expression returns a table with four columns of data type Any called Column1, Column2, Column3 and Column3, and no rows:

#table(4,{})

Also, if you have a list of lists with an unknown number of items in and you want to use each nested list for the row values in a table, you can use a null value in the first parameter of #table. The following expression returns a table with four columns like the one above, but with two rows of integer values:

#table(null, {{1,2,3,4},{2,3,4,5}})