State the advantages of tabular presentation of data.
Answers
A table allows "random access", rather than scanning an entire list or paragraph. Thus if the information is such that a reader will only want a part of it, a table has advantages. For example, consider tuition charges at a university, which depend on undergrad vs. grad, in-state vs. out-of-state, number of credit hours. It is likely that a reader only wants to find the tuition charge relating to his or her own status.
A second case where a table has advantages is when the reader will want to compare information across rows or columns. For example, you have benchmark results for a number of systems. If the rows are different benchmarks and the columns are different systems, then a reader can easily compare how different systems did on the same benchmark (scanning a row) or how a single system did on different benchmarks (scanning a column). It would be tedious to make these correlations with the data in a list or paragraph.