The table environment

The tabular environment doesn't cover all that you need to do with tables. For example, you might want a caption for your table. For this and other reasons, you should typically place your tabular environment inside a table environment:


\begin{table}
  \caption{Performance at peak F-measure}
  \begin{tabular}{| r | r || c | c | c |}


      ...


  \end{tabular}
\end{table}


Why do the two different environments exist? Think of it this way: The tabular environment is concerned with arranging elements in a tabular grid, while the table environment represents the table more conceptually. This explains why it isn't tabular but table that provides for captioning (because the caption isn't displayed in the grid-like layout).


A table environment has a lot of similarities with a figure environment, in the way the "floating" is handled etc. For instance you can specify its placement in the page with the option [placement], the valid values are any combination of (order is not important):
h where the table is declared (here)
t at the top of the page
b at the bottom of the page
p on a dedicated page of floats
! override the default float restrictions. E.g., the maximum size allowed of a b float is normally quite small; if you want a large one, you need this ! parameter as well.


The default is [tbp]. If you want to place a table in the place where it's declared, do not just write [h]; if the table cannot fit (because the text is near the bottom of the page, say) it will float to a dedicated page of floats (as if it were a p float) which can be some distance away in the document. A good rule of thumb is to always use htbp until the document is finished, at which stage the final float parameters can be fine-tuned.


The table environment is also useful when you want to have a list of tables at the beginning or end of your document with the command \listoftables; it enables making cross-references to the table with:


You may refer to table~\ref{my_table} for an example.


...


\begin{table}
  \begin{tabular}
     ...
  \end{tabular}
  \caption{An example of table}
  \label{my_table}
\end{table}